How the Download Adviser Works

Since there are so many games, and since most of them run on many different operating systems, it would be an incredibly huge job if someone had to sit down and write out individual instructions for every game on every OS - not to mention the work of keeping all that information up to date.

Fortunately, there's a lot of similarity in the installation instructions from one game to another, thanks to the fact that most of them were written with one of the popular authoring systems. The installation instructions for a game depend mostly on (a) the authoring system that was used to create it, and (b) the operating system that you want to play it on.

The Download Adviser determines the game's authoring system by looking at its format, and asks you to choose which operating system you want to use to play it. It then looks in the database for the instructions for that combination of authoring system and OS. It combines those instructions with the details of the game (its download location, whether it's in a ZIP or other compressed format) to generate the custom instructions.

If you encounter any problems with the Download Adviser's instructions, the problem is probably one of two things:

• The game's download links could be wrong. You can find out exactly what's in the game's download links by going to the game's main page, scrolling to the bottom, and clicking "Edit this page." The Download Links section shows the exact file format and URL (Web download location) for each link. If you see a problem and know what the correct setting should be, you should go ahead and fix it yourself. If you think there's a problem but aren't sure how to fix it, you might be able to get help by contacting the game's author.
• The pre-written instructions OS/tool combination might be wrong. You can view the instruction templates via the File Format List or Operating System List pages. The instructions almost always have to link to executable program downloads, so for security reasons we don't let members update these directly. If you spot an error, though, please let us know about it so that we can fix it - see our Contact page.