So with Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas having been added to GOG (Good Old Games — legal, DRM-free game seller which strives to offer compatibility with Windows 10), and portable SSDs being a thing now, I thought it would be super awesome if we could run these games portably over USB.
I know they're not open source, but I think in the spirit of offering games DRM-free, GOG would be okay with running the game off a USB and carrying it with you. I think the strong argument against portable AAA games is that in making it portable, you're bypassing its DRM and it's seen as a form of piracy, but with the game being DRM-free to start with, I'd like to think that argument goes out the window.
Of course, I'm not looking for a 9GB download, haha! I have Fallout 3. I'm just trying to figure out how to get it to run on my portable SSD. I have it installed on my laptop. Steam isn't installed, nor is any other Bethesda game. I searched the registry for both fallout and bethesda, and only came up with MUI stuff. The recent lists and whatnot. Fallout 3 puts a default copy of its preferences in User → AppData → Local → Fallout3, and its settings and saves are in User → Documents → My Games → Fallout 3. But recreating these folders on a "clean" system (one that has never had Fallout 3 installed on it) and then running the Fallout loader, the Fallout game exe, and the Fallout Script Extender (which bypasses Games for Windows Live on the Steam version, but GfWL has been removed from the GOG version with a dummy xlive.dll file) all open the launcher, which prompts me to install.
I think the next thing to try is to actually copy the GOG Games folder to the C drive, though I'd really like to avoid copying ~9GB every time I want to play on a different computer. Copying the saves is one thing, copying the full installation is entirely another.
Ultimately, I'd love to see PA.c launchers for many popular GOG games. I think DRM-free gaming would be a much more viable alternative to a more closed system like Steam, if running games off a USB 3.x flash drive, or better yet portable SSD (the Samsung T5, the newer version of mine, is $150 for 500GB... not bad considering my T3 was more like $220!) was a thing.
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Whether you can make a game legally portable is determined by the game's end-user license - GOG don't make the licenses for the individual games - the game's developers do.
So please don't misread GOG providing DRM free versions of the game as them condoning the creation of a portable version by end users - GOG don't have the right to allow or disallow that on behalf of the game's developer.
I would say that at least 95% of GOG games would still explicitly disallow modification or distribution by an end user, and almost none of the rest would explicitly allow it in any way.