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Running Myst III Exile on a MacBook Pro.
18 May 07 10:56 am Filed in: Geekery
I have to head south for a three day conference in a
couple of days (three days away from Kathy -
ARGH! 
) so I'm doing what any
self-respecting geek would do and loading up the
lappy with games to while away the evenings in
the hotel room.
Between bouts of Vice City I've been re-visiting the worlds of Myst, so I thought I'd try to get at least a couple of them running on the new hardware. Here's the thing; intel-based Macs don't run Classic, yet the earlier titles in the Myst series, Myst & Riven aren't Mac OS X native. This is one of the reasons I picked up an older G4 desktop on eBay (AU$80 is hard to go past!) so we'd still be able to play the retro stuff - but I'm obviously not going to drag a desktop along for the ride.
So, Myst III Exile and Myst IV Revelations were the candidates, the latter installing and running perfectly. Installing Exile proved to be interesting: the installer only runs under Classic. Bugger. So the gaming G4 comes into play. Install Exile on it, patch it to 1.22 and then the Mac OS X native version, then copy the folder over to the lappy and add the remaining disks of the complete install. Bonus: the latest patch allows the complete install to run without asking for any disks! Now came a curly problem: Exile ran perfectly (the animation is liquid smooth) but some of the soundtrack cut out every 2 seconds making it unplayable. Well, you could play it I guess but immersion is the key to any Myst experience and that's one helluva distraction.
A little searching found this thread over at the Ubisoft forums. The folks there identified that the sound issue only happened on dual-processor machines (which the MBP is) and infiniteline there came up with an ingenious workaround. Doesn't work with two processors? Disable the second processor. You can do this by grabbing the latest CHUD developer tools from here and installing it. You'll now see a CPU panel in your System Preferences where you can disable and enable the second processor on the fly. Nifty eh? After you disable the second processor, fire up Exile and revel in perfect sound once more. Thanks, infiniteline!
Oh and when you're done don't forget to re-enable the second processor so your Mac is back to it's full beat-other-computers-up-and-take-their-lunch-money speed.
) so I'm doing what any
self-respecting geek would do and loading up the
lappy with games to while away the evenings in
the hotel room.
Between bouts of Vice City I've been re-visiting the worlds of Myst, so I thought I'd try to get at least a couple of them running on the new hardware. Here's the thing; intel-based Macs don't run Classic, yet the earlier titles in the Myst series, Myst & Riven aren't Mac OS X native. This is one of the reasons I picked up an older G4 desktop on eBay (AU$80 is hard to go past!) so we'd still be able to play the retro stuff - but I'm obviously not going to drag a desktop along for the ride.
So, Myst III Exile and Myst IV Revelations were the candidates, the latter installing and running perfectly. Installing Exile proved to be interesting: the installer only runs under Classic. Bugger. So the gaming G4 comes into play. Install Exile on it, patch it to 1.22 and then the Mac OS X native version, then copy the folder over to the lappy and add the remaining disks of the complete install. Bonus: the latest patch allows the complete install to run without asking for any disks! Now came a curly problem: Exile ran perfectly (the animation is liquid smooth) but some of the soundtrack cut out every 2 seconds making it unplayable. Well, you could play it I guess but immersion is the key to any Myst experience and that's one helluva distraction.
A little searching found this thread over at the Ubisoft forums. The folks there identified that the sound issue only happened on dual-processor machines (which the MBP is) and infiniteline there came up with an ingenious workaround. Doesn't work with two processors? Disable the second processor. You can do this by grabbing the latest CHUD developer tools from here and installing it. You'll now see a CPU panel in your System Preferences where you can disable and enable the second processor on the fly. Nifty eh? After you disable the second processor, fire up Exile and revel in perfect sound once more. Thanks, infiniteline!
Oh and when you're done don't forget to re-enable the second processor so your Mac is back to it's full beat-other-computers-up-and-take-their-lunch-money speed.