Burning GOG games to disc, properly
I started out installing Windows XP on computers around the neighborhood and spending the money on games. Those games came in boxes. You put the disc in, a menu appeared, you clicked Install, and the drive got the game’s own icon and name in My Computer.
Everything I buy now is a download. GOG at least gives you the installer to keep, which is the whole point of buying there, but a folder of setup_something_1.2_(80728).exe files on a hard drive is not a game you own in any way that feels like owning it. So I wrote a tool that turns that folder into a disc that behaves like the ones in the boxes.
It is called DiscWright.
You point it at the folder your GOG download came in, give it a label, an icon and a background, and it writes an ISO. Put that disc in a Windows PC and you get the game’s icon and title on the drive, a menu with Play, Install, the manual and the extras, and every file where the menu expects to find it. Several games can share one disc, with their patches and DLC filed under the game they belong to.
The part I did not expect#
The interesting problems were never the ones I planned for.
A disc that reads on Windows XP cannot hold a big game. The image writer built into Windows refuses to put a file over 2 GiB into the old ISO9660 filesystem. Not 4 GiB, which is what the format allows, and not what any documentation I could find says. GOG splits its installers into parts one byte under 4 GiB, so every part of a big game is over that limit. I only believed it after writing a script that built images with files of increasing size until one failed, and the answer came back at exactly 2,147,483,648 bytes. The option is now greyed out for those discs, with a tooltip saying why.
Writing the same thing twice finds bugs nothing else does. I am porting the tool to Linux, and the port is checked against the Windows version file by file on a real disc. Every time the two disagreed about a byte, one of them was wrong, and four times out of five it was the Windows one. The disc’s Linux icon came out as random pixels for most real game icons. Every scaled icon had a faintly see through rim. A game renamed to the wrong thing could stop the menu compiling entirely. None of those were visible from inside the original code, and all of them are fixed now.
Windows cannot read half the names Linux can write. A disc made on Linux is read through Joliet, which quietly cuts a name at 103 characters and replaces the characters Windows forbids. A manual whose name was changed on the way is a Manual button that opens nothing. I measured what actually survives by building test discs and mounting them on Windows 11, and the Linux tool now refuses to build a disc whose names would not arrive intact, naming each file.
Where it is#
It is free and MIT licensed, it runs on Windows 10 and 11, and there is nothing to install: it is PowerShell, so you can read it before you run it. The Linux version builds the same disc and is close, but not released yet.
Today it only understands GOG installers, which is a fair complaint I have already had from somebody who used it. Any executable, and folders with no installer at all, are next.