As with all old games that you try to purchase now, your experience may vary when attempting to backup these discs since they are old and can have disc errors. Luckily 99% of the CDs backed up successfully via Alcohol 120%. However, only CD 1 of BG 1 had issues, which unfortunately means I can't actually play BG 1 original yet. However, a few days ago I bought a "Very Good" condition Big Box version of Baldur's Gate 1 so hopefully CD1 on there will be good and I can back that up and wrap this up. Some photos below of everything I've received, and a few photos from the seller of the BG1 Big Box.
Two interesting thing about the Big Box:
1. It's nice that the person had the discs in a plastic lol, but we'll see their actual condition once I receive them.
2. I noticed that even though this is just BG1 (No expansion), the big box already has a slot for disc 6.. which makes me think that the developers intentionally left that slot open cause they knew they were going to release an expansion, and thus allowed you to have a place for that disc in the big box once it releases. If that's the case, that's pretty cool that the devs did that. Bioware/Interplay seemed to have been an amazing company back in the day. I have played Bioware games before, specifically Dragon Age 1: Origins, DA1: Awakening, Mass Effect 1-3, but the 90s Bioware seemed awesome. The older I get and the more I see things nowadays, I do believe that the "Golden Age" of PC gaming was probably around 1993-2003~ (We can extend to 2005-2007 if you really want to but I feel max would probably be around that 2004-2005 since even though WoW wasn't an offline game, I do recognize it's impact in gaming history). This is not even including console games like SNES, PS1, N64, GB, GBC, GBA which was also around that 1991-2003 time period. If you add NES and others, then it goes back to 1985 but you can see the pattern, the 90s and early to mid 2000s was critical for gaming. I am a 90s baby though so nostalgia is hitting hard, but I think most of us can agree on the impact of gaming during the 90s to early-mid 2000s.
. The nice thing about this is that it not only works in Windows 10, but also even in Windows XP and 7 (which means you can run the games within a VM using cnc-ddraw as the DirectDraw backend).