Opening an Old Book Again
Aug. 27th, 2018 08:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerAlong the endless road of fiddling around with old computer games and programs via emulation, my thoughts began bending back to a destination I'd touched on before. It wouldn't be long until The Digital Antiquarian got to 1993; he might cover the CD-ROM game Myst, and that coverage might even be positive. While I don't often "play along" with the games that site visits, I could imagine making an exception in this particular case. The only problem was that as I contemplated doing that, I knew I could almost manage playing "the game as first released."
I still have the CD of that original Macintosh version. It's easy enough with Disk Utility (and a USB-connected DVD-ROM drive) to make a disk image that can be loaded by the three varying Macintosh emulators. What I'd found with the colour-capable Macintosh II-emulating Mini vMac, though, was that QuickTime playback freezes (even if it doesn't lock up the emulated machine altogether) at anything faster than "actual speed," and at that speed things are a bit sluggish, a computer proclaimed the (pricy) state of the art in 1987 struggling with a game from 1993. Beyond that, too, the "tower rotation" key to learning how to get off Myst Island itself just doesn't seem to work. I do know the old jokes that since Myst is more about the acquisition and manipulation of information than objects, it's possible, once you know how, to reach the game's understated conclusion without ever leaving the first island. Still, as ever that seemed missing the point to me.
Turning my attention back to the previous options for emulating a colour Macintosh, Basilisk II and SheepShaver, I found both of them being future-proofed with the development of 64-bit versions, and I did manage to get them working. However, I found that Basilisk II (which emulates a "68K-based Mac" similar to those Myst would have run on in the first place) returned error messages I could also find reported on the message board of an "emulating the Macintosh" site. SheepShaver, which emulated the slightly later PowerPC machines, I did recall being able to run the game. In the process of experimenting with different system software configurations, though, all of a sudden the whole emulator was crashing as soon as the game started. "It used to work but now it doesn't" is a perpetually maddening development.
There were options left open to me further afield. I'd heard of the multi-adventure engine SCUMMVM having been expanded far beyond the LucasArts games it had started with to where it could play Myst Masterpiece Edition, and I do have a DVD-ROM version of that version of the game I'd managed to buy years ago, back when the "Classic environment" wasn't quite obsolete yet. (Even to this day, I suppose, I can still run "Classic" on my antique PowerBook G4, although it has been months since I've even started that portable up.) SCUMMVM, of course, was a bit less of a production to get started. However, it could only run the Windows version of the game, and even if I could retrieve that version's files off the dual-format DVD something felt ever so slightly gauche about that. Beyond that, I suppose one question is weighing the staticky hiss of the original Myst's sound against impressions I've seen accusations some of Myst Masterpiece Edition's background music tracks are a bit shorter before they loop. From there, I suppose I could install and play the iPhone port of Myst, pay for RealMyst for the iPad, or see if my computer can handle RealMyst Masterpiece Edition, but that would get still further away from "the original version."
I didn't feel quite licked yet with emulation, though. With Basilisk II and SheepShaver, I'd been connecting the Myst disk image via their preferences, but one suggestion on the message board had been to make a disk image large enough to itself hold the Myst disk image and mount it inside the emulated computer using a particular utility program. When I tried that under Mac OS 9 (not to be confused with the OS-9 Color Computer magazines were always talking up even if they also always seemed a bit vague about what you'd do once it was running), it actually worked. Even as I noted the computer ran fast enough to make some of the in-game controls twitchy, though, I was thinking ahead to subtle aesthetic details and pondering the difference between the flatter, more black-and-white look of System 7 and the medium grays that followed it, the reason perhaps why I'd tried the same scheme with an earlier version of the operating system only to find it didn't seem to work. There was a solution of sorts, though, in installing the old system makeover extension Kaleidoscope, which I'd bought a registration code for back in the days of actual hardware. Among its numerous fanciful makeover schemes, there was an austere "System 7." With that taken care of, I decided to compose this piece "inside" the older computer itself with the SimpleText mini-editor. Almost as soon as I'd started that, though, I did notice again how the Chicago font wasn't quite the same any more in Mac OS 9, a "picky small change" different from Myst Masterpiece Edition, I suppose. I tried stepping back one system version only to find the sound wasn't working at all, and then, contemplating other looks I'd tried out with Kaleidoscope back in the day, I did a bit more looking and came up with a utility package to hack the System file and change the font to an earlier version. How much time I'll find to actually play the game now before it possibly gets covered is a question, but I suppose solving these small problems is always sort of interesting.
I still have the CD of that original Macintosh version. It's easy enough with Disk Utility (and a USB-connected DVD-ROM drive) to make a disk image that can be loaded by the three varying Macintosh emulators. What I'd found with the colour-capable Macintosh II-emulating Mini vMac, though, was that QuickTime playback freezes (even if it doesn't lock up the emulated machine altogether) at anything faster than "actual speed," and at that speed things are a bit sluggish, a computer proclaimed the (pricy) state of the art in 1987 struggling with a game from 1993. Beyond that, too, the "tower rotation" key to learning how to get off Myst Island itself just doesn't seem to work. I do know the old jokes that since Myst is more about the acquisition and manipulation of information than objects, it's possible, once you know how, to reach the game's understated conclusion without ever leaving the first island. Still, as ever that seemed missing the point to me.
Turning my attention back to the previous options for emulating a colour Macintosh, Basilisk II and SheepShaver, I found both of them being future-proofed with the development of 64-bit versions, and I did manage to get them working. However, I found that Basilisk II (which emulates a "68K-based Mac" similar to those Myst would have run on in the first place) returned error messages I could also find reported on the message board of an "emulating the Macintosh" site. SheepShaver, which emulated the slightly later PowerPC machines, I did recall being able to run the game. In the process of experimenting with different system software configurations, though, all of a sudden the whole emulator was crashing as soon as the game started. "It used to work but now it doesn't" is a perpetually maddening development.
There were options left open to me further afield. I'd heard of the multi-adventure engine SCUMMVM having been expanded far beyond the LucasArts games it had started with to where it could play Myst Masterpiece Edition, and I do have a DVD-ROM version of that version of the game I'd managed to buy years ago, back when the "Classic environment" wasn't quite obsolete yet. (Even to this day, I suppose, I can still run "Classic" on my antique PowerBook G4, although it has been months since I've even started that portable up.) SCUMMVM, of course, was a bit less of a production to get started. However, it could only run the Windows version of the game, and even if I could retrieve that version's files off the dual-format DVD something felt ever so slightly gauche about that. Beyond that, I suppose one question is weighing the staticky hiss of the original Myst's sound against impressions I've seen accusations some of Myst Masterpiece Edition's background music tracks are a bit shorter before they loop. From there, I suppose I could install and play the iPhone port of Myst, pay for RealMyst for the iPad, or see if my computer can handle RealMyst Masterpiece Edition, but that would get still further away from "the original version."
I didn't feel quite licked yet with emulation, though. With Basilisk II and SheepShaver, I'd been connecting the Myst disk image via their preferences, but one suggestion on the message board had been to make a disk image large enough to itself hold the Myst disk image and mount it inside the emulated computer using a particular utility program. When I tried that under Mac OS 9 (not to be confused with the OS-9 Color Computer magazines were always talking up even if they also always seemed a bit vague about what you'd do once it was running), it actually worked. Even as I noted the computer ran fast enough to make some of the in-game controls twitchy, though, I was thinking ahead to subtle aesthetic details and pondering the difference between the flatter, more black-and-white look of System 7 and the medium grays that followed it, the reason perhaps why I'd tried the same scheme with an earlier version of the operating system only to find it didn't seem to work. There was a solution of sorts, though, in installing the old system makeover extension Kaleidoscope, which I'd bought a registration code for back in the days of actual hardware. Among its numerous fanciful makeover schemes, there was an austere "System 7." With that taken care of, I decided to compose this piece "inside" the older computer itself with the SimpleText mini-editor. Almost as soon as I'd started that, though, I did notice again how the Chicago font wasn't quite the same any more in Mac OS 9, a "picky small change" different from Myst Masterpiece Edition, I suppose. I tried stepping back one system version only to find the sound wasn't working at all, and then, contemplating other looks I'd tried out with Kaleidoscope back in the day, I did a bit more looking and came up with a utility package to hack the System file and change the font to an earlier version. How much time I'll find to actually play the game now before it possibly gets covered is a question, but I suppose solving these small problems is always sort of interesting.