Myst

What works

The game installs fine (mostly) and usually starts up correctly. The Brøderbund and Cyan logo videos play fine, as do the credits, up until the Myst book lands. If you skip the initial videos by pressing space, it's sometimes possible to get to the screen where the Myst book is open; clicking on the linking panel will blank the screen and play the linking sound.

The "Making of" video works fine, as long as you don't open the menu.

What does not

Sometimes, Myst fails to start up at all. This seems to be entirely random.

Clicking on the Myst book, or on the Myst linking panel, consistently causes Myst to hang. If the book was clicked, the audio (from when the book was on the floor, not from inside the book) will continue to play, but the video will freeze, and the cursor will disappear. If the panel was clicked (by skipping the initial videos), the linking sound plays, and the screen turns black, but nothing happens beyond that point.

The cursor is displayed inside a red box, and has some odd transparency issues -- these can be seen most clearly when the Myst book is open (some of the book is visible through the cursor).

Myst occasionally crashes outright rather than hanging; it's not clear what causes this.

Workarounds

What was not tested

Anything beyond the initial link to Myst (since that causes a hang).

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

I strongly advise running Myst in Wine's emulated desktop, in order to preserve your screen resolution settings. A 32-bit wineprefix (i.e. WINEARCH=win32) is required to run Myst. Installation was tested in Windows 7 mode, with emulated desktop disabled. "Error 401" (String variable is not large enough for string) doesn't seem to affect installation. When prompted to install QuickTime, choose "advanced", and skip searching for conflicting QuickTime installations. Myst will complain and refuse to run if you are not in Windows 95 mode: once the game is installed, run winecfg, change to Windows 95, and enable emulated desktop. If Myst doesn't start, and you get a console message like "Cannot change screen BPP from 32 to 8", close the emulated desktop and run Myst again.