Riven: The Sequel to Myst

What works

Installing and playing the game works nearly perfectly, with just a few tweaks, see below.

What does not

In full screen mode the mouse stops working almost immediately. I didn't bother trying to find a workaround, as the game is better played in a Wine Virtual Desktop anyway.

Workarounds

What was not tested

-

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

This is the Riven 5xCD version 1.02 from 'Myst The Collection'. I installed the game, and the included QuickTime v2.1.2, in a 32-bit wineprefix, WindowsXP mode (but Windows 9x would have been more appropriate), and played the game in a 640x480 Wine Virtual desktop. The Installer has a problem with calculating the free amount of disc space. If it complains about disc space just copy some dummy data to the hard drive until it fills up to above the next 2 GByte boundary. The Installer may seem to hang at the end, but there is a registration window that is minimised instead of popping up. Just find that window, and click cancel. No DLL/QuickTime fixes were necessary, but the game must be played on a single CPU core, otherwise it will freeze randomly: taskset -c 0 env WINEPREFIX= wine explorer /desktop=Riven,640x480 Riven.exe & To speed up/improve gameplay, and to avoid issues with swapping CD's, I would recommend to copy files from all CDs Data/ folder to the Riven/data/ folder on the hard drive. During gameplay the only (very minor) issues I encountered were: Two pages are sometimes turned at once in books you are reading. The 'pling' device on Prison Island may sometimes have a problem with detecting mouse clicks.

The version number is available in the Help → About... menu entry, or from the first line of readme.txt on the disc (disc 1 of the 5-disc version).

Running Riven with Wine

There are a couple of workarounds needed to successfully run Riven with Wine, mainly due to bugs in Riven itself rather than deficiencies in Wine. This HOWTO will guide you through the process of installing and running Riven.

Prerequisites

• A fresh wineprefix in Windows 7 mode.
• A set of Riven CD-ROMs.

Installation

Insert Disc 1, then double-click setup.exe. Follow the prompts on the screen as normal until you reach QuickTime installation.

When prompted to install QuickTime, select "Advanced Setup", or the installer will crash. When asked to check for existing versions of QuickTime, click "skip", then "yes".

At this point, you will be prompted to install a demo of The Journeyman Project 3 - Legacy of Time. It is suggested that you click "no".

When the Red Orb registration window appears, choose either "Register By Mail" or "Cancel" – it doesn't matter which.

You have now installed Riven!

Running Riven

Open a terminal window and change directory to C:\Program Files\Riven. Assuming you named your wineprefix .wine (the default), running cd ~/.wine/drive_c/Program\ Files/Riven/ will accomplish this. There should be a file called Riven.exe in this directory.

In order to run Riven, you will need to execute the command taskset -c 0 wine Riven.exe. This causes Riven to run on one core only, which works around a bug in Riven that causes it to randomly freeze.

Whilst not strictly necessary in order to play Riven, taking advantage of Wine's emulated virtual desktop feature avoids leaving your screen resolution changed in the event of Riven crashing or another window stealing focus.

HOWTO: UbiSoft Riven the sequal to Myst

Wine-1.3.21

Background:

The original CD-ROM version of Riven was released back in 1997. It was developed to run with QuickTime version 2.X. Later on it was released on a single DVD-ROM with improved audio, using QuickTime version 3.0.   In 2003 a 10th anniversary edition was updated to work with the current windows systems. This version came with QuickTime 6.3.2.

There has been significant changes to both computer architecture and QuickTime since then. Many people have had problems getting the 10th anniversary edition to work on Windows XP and above systems even when using the older QuickTime 6.3.2 runtime files. I tried getting this version to work with Wine and it wouldn't even run. Riven was designed around QuickTime version 2.X and 3.X. The installation methods I've outlined below forces Riven to use the versions of QuickTime it was designed for. This fixed all the problems I had with the game working.

There are two parts required for Riven to work with the older QuickTime files. One is to obtain the QuickTime runtime itself. The second part is an optional step of configuring the Riven runtime to work in GDI only mode (Safe mode) instead of using DirectX mode. Apparently removing the DirectX mode disables some hardware enhanced features like hardware overlay. I found no visible or performance differences between both modes. In fact I needed to use the GDI mode because I was experiencing incorrect images being displayed behind Riven animated events as explained in bug 6230. Setting QuickTime to GDI mode fixed this problem for me and made Riven work. 

Overview:

This HOWTO is broken down into two sections. The first section covers the installation process for the DVD-ROM and the 10th anniversary edition of Riven. The second section covers the installation process for the 5-disc CD-ROM edition.

NOTE: This HOWTO is based on a clean installation of Wine 1.3.21 on Ubuntu Jaunty (9.04) using NVIDIA GeForce based graphics cards. Results may vary if other applications are currently installed within Wine, or a different operating system platform and/or a different graphics card is used.

Installation - DVD-ROM & 10th Anniversary Edition

• Make sure your Graphics and Sound cards/drivers and installed and running properly.
• Download and install Wine 1.3.21 if necessary (For best results remove prior versions of Wine)
• Insert the Riven DVD-ROM into your drive and open the 'Setup.exe' file with wine. This can be done via console with the command wine Setup.exe or by right clicking on it in your file manager and clicking "Open with Wine". 
• Follow the prompts and install Riven. *Note: The Riven DVD-ROM comes with a QuickTime version 3 installer and the 10th anniversary edition comes with a QuickTime 6.3.2 installer. If you have a newer version of QuickTime and would like to keep it don't bother installing either during the installation. This How-to utilises run-time files in the Riven directory. This means you don''t need to install QuickTime.

Optional Step - Full installation on to Hard Drive

Riven only requires 600 MB of space to run by default installation. This requires you to keep the DVD-ROM in the drive while playing to load the content. If you would like to have a full installation on to your computer, that doesn't require keeping the DVD-ROM in your computer to play. Follow these steps.


• To complete this optional step you need to copy over all the data files in the 'data' folder from the Riven DVD to the 'data' directory in your Riven installation
• Copy your Riven data files over to your location directory. This can be done in console with the command "cp * /mnt/cd/data ~/.wine/drive_cdrive_c/Program\ Files/Ubi\ Soft/Riven/Data"  or via GNOME by opening the DVD and then the data directory. Pressing control+A and to select all. Then Pressing control+c to copy all. Go to your installation location of Riven and open the data directory. Press control+v to paste the files. A dialogue box will ask you if you would like to overwrite the files. Click yes. *note replace '/mnt/cd/' with the mount location of your DVD and replace "~/.wine/drive_cdrive_c/Program\ Files/Ubi\ Soft/Riven/" with the location of your Riven installation.
• You need to edit the 'riven.cfg' to tell the game to use the local files instead of the DVD. There are two ways you can accomplish this. One is to download my already configured 'riven.cfg' and replace yours with it. Or you can do it manually by editing it by hand. I'll explain both methods.
• If you would like to use my configuration. Download it here Riven.cfg.  Once you have downloaded it, go to your riven installation directory and make a backup of your 'riven.cfg' file. Then replace it with this one.
• If you would like to do it by hand, open up the 'riven.cfg'  file in your favourite text editor. You can do this in console with the command "gedit ~/.wine/drive_cdrive_c/Program\ Files/Ubi\ Soft/Riven/riven.cfg" or in gnome by right clicking on the riven.cfg file and clicking "open with gedit". You'll notice under the "; Data file sets" section there are eight " Disc = *" This could be Disc = 1, Disc = 0, Disc = 3 etc. You need to replace all of them with "Disc = 0" then save the changes.

Quicktime Section

• As mentioned above, for this installation we will be using QuickTime version 3.0.2 runtime files placed in the Riven directory.  There are three ways you can go about accomplishing these steps. The first is to download my QuickTime achieve which has two files 'quicktime.qts' and 'quicktime.qtp'  then place them in your Riven installation directory. The second method requires you to install QuickTime 3.0 and configure it in Wine and finally the 3rd method requires you to download and install QuickTime 3.0 on a Windows system to configure then to copy these files over to your Linux system. The first method is far less intensive but if you don't trust my files you can do it yourself with method 2 and 3.

Method One

• Download the following zip file: RivenQT3.zip

• Extract both files to your Riven installation directory. If you're in console, unzip /path/to/rivenqt3.zip -d /path/to/Riven. *note replace /path/to/rivenqt3.zip with the path to rivenqt3.zip file and replace /path/to/Riven with the installation path for Riven.  If you are using the GNOME file browser, copy the rivenqt3.zip to your Riven installation directory then right click on it and click extract. *note If you don't want to have QuickTime running in GDI safe mode as explained in the background and in the known issues I suggest removing the quicktime.qtp file. 

Method 2

• This method requires you to install QuickTime 3.0 on your Linux system, then use wine control to configure QQuickTime to work in GDI safe mode. Download QuickTime 3.0 then run "wine quicktime-3.0.exe" and follow the prompts to install it. Once QuickTime has been installed, run "wine control". You should see the wine control centre from here open the QuickTime control menu. If all goes well you should see the QuickTime configuration. Change the video rendering to GDI Safe only then exit. Go to your wine directory then find your QuickTime install. Copy over the quicktime.qtp and quicktime.qts to your riven root directory
  

Method 3

• This method requires you to install Quicktime 3.0 on a Windows system. Then copy over the files to your Linux system. Boot up your Windows system and download QuickTime 3.0. Install it on your system then go to your control panel and run the QuickTime control. From the QuickTime video settings change it to GDI Safe Mode only then close it. Locate your quicktime.qts and quicktime.qtp files. They should be located in your /windows/system32/ directory. Copy them to a removal media, or over to your Linux partition, then boot Linux. Copy the quicktime.qts and quicktime.qtp files over to your riven root directory.
• If all has gone well you should now be able to play Riven perfectly.  

Known Issues:

• Black/Incorrect background image shown during QuickTime events: bug 6230. 
• There is a fault once you find the cave behind the prison on village island . When you get to the end and look out over the sea. If you click on the light it will turn on. Once you turn around you will be warped outside of the prison. You can still get past this part. Just don't go to the end of the cave. Problem explained more here

Fix for problems

Installation - 5-Disc CD-ROM Edition

• Make sure your Graphics and Sound cards/drivers and installed and running properly.
• Download and install Wine 1.3.21 if necessary (For best results remove prior versions of Wine)