Now-a-days I don't have any CD reader on my laptop

[Shaitan]

Hello all

It has been a while. Due to loss of my last laptop, which suddenly just died, I got a newish laptop. But alas there's no place to incert my old CDs. This can't be the first time anyone has this issue, so I went to google and found GoG. But some questions popped up:

1) Can I mod GoGs version of BG2?

2) Should I buy the EE version?

3) Is there other and better solutions?

Cheers

[The Artisan]

You could buy an external CD driver. The GoG version is an add-on to the EE so you can only get both, not one or the other.

Personally, I think the EE is overall vastly superior, but as a modder I'm biased.

[Isewein]

It depends how particular you are about your mods. I've still been holding off on transitioning to the EEs, due to a number of old classics not having been adapted yet. But that is slowly changing, and generally it seems that the more unpleasant aspects of the EEs have now been made either optional or can be fixed with mods. You could have the essentially same experience with a few nice, added features such as faster loot collection or weapon switching. And Siege of Dragonspear seems like a decent addition to the story as well; just treat it as a quest mod.

[lynx]

Modding on ees is harder for the user, but gog is a good option either way.

[cmorgan]

Hey there, Shaitan - great to see you! 

You could grab an iso of the discs and mount them virtually. I haven’t put a disc in a drive with my original copies in over a decade. But to tell you the truth, the EE ones are the way to go. I do a direct Beamdog purchase, but GoG and Steam both offer the same kind of stuff. Hard to decide - $20 for a usb mobile disc drive, or the same range for a game, or the extra time to create a virtual iso and transfer it - I’d buy the game (got both - when cost averaging time spent over cost, I can honestly say that for me it ends up being like $0.000000000000000000000001 cost per hour even with double-purchasing both old and new!!).

EET looks very promising, is stable and carefully supported, and I think will be the eventual “best in class” continuous game experience. It is really impressive work - and if I remember, you were a BGT player, so it might be your cup of tea.

 

[Shaitan]

Hi all

Thanks for your kind answers. I didn't get to BGT, but had my own collection of mods I used to use. However I miss BG, and wanted to give it a try again. The iPad wasn't really the thing for my - and it didn't have mods So here I am.

I think I'll do a EE purchase, as you say cmorgan, the cost per played hour is next to nothing. I will have to read up a lot of what has happened the last couple of years. And find out what that EET actually is

Glad to be back.

[Jarno Mikkola]

On 2/7/2019 at 8:33 AM, Artemius I said:

You could buy an external CD driver. The GoG version is an add-on to the EE so you can only get both, not one or the other.

 

Ouh, cheese how you lie, lie and lie.

First of all, there is an Original Sage edition of the original game(BG1) that Gog had, it has been removed from the product space, cause the new-Atari ... but technically you can still get it. It doesn't need the CDs/DVD.

Next. Windows 10 comes with it's own CD image program installed internally, so you just need to open the CD/DVD image file(.iso, .mds) with Windows double click. Which mounts the file as a separate drive. To get one of those... there are plenty if you know where to find ... or you can even use your own CDs if you like... but that needs an external program and CD drive you can loan.

 

There is also the so called Never Ending Journey 2 no-CD crack to the BG2 game. It's called that because it's in the package, but also you can find it as attached to SHSforums in one of my posts cause it was originally part of a different thing, and the NEJ2 just added it to itself..with permissions.

Yes, at the digital age, software approach is always better than hardware, mostly because it's free.

The "cd crack" is a simple hex edit:

 

Baldur's Gate II: Throne of Bhaal v2.5.26498 cd-rom check patch.
File: BGMAIN.EXE

Change bytes (all numbers in hex):

Find  0F84DA08

after these numbers should be

00006a006a008b

Change them to

0000e9ee030000

Edited February 8, 2019 by Jarno Mikkola

[Shaitan]

Good to see you again Jarno.

The complete saga EE don't yields troubles? I can get it cheeper on Steam I see.

 

Cheers