[bobette]

Fill and receive:
http://www.ubisoft.com/support/myst3cd1.php

[Skywalkers new Hand]

I don't think this will do Mac users much good. I talked ubisoft for an hour last night and they had no clue what was causing any of the reported Mac Problems.

They haven't even heard of any problems actually. Is everyone mailing the problems to them?

[bobette]

What kind of problems are you having? I've been running M3 on 2 machines and it's been doing fine (both full and minimal installs).

[Skywalkers new Hand]

Originally posted by bobette:
What kind of problems are you having? I've been running M3 on 2 machines and it's been doing fine (both full and minimal installs).

What is your computer? What OS? What version of QuickTime?

------------------

[bobette]

iMac DVSE 400/192, OS 9.0.4, QT 5.0.1 Pro
iBook DVSE 466/192, OS 9.1, QT 5.0.1 Pro (even running at the energy saving 366 it's smooth).

Did you copy the Bink Shared Library to your extensions folder?

[Skywalkers new Hand]

Originally posted by bobette:
iMac DVSE 400/192, OS 9.0.4, QT 5.0.1 Pro
iBook DVSE 466/192, OS 9.1, QT 5.0.1 Pro (even running at the energy saving 366 it's smooth).

Did you copy the Bink Shared Library to your extensions folder?

IS your VM on or OFF? Do you have ALL the recent software updates by Apple? Do you have Disk Burner and iTunes installed? Have you tried to use it on a G4?

WERE does the Myst read me tell you to insall the Blink extention yourself?

Thanks for your help, alot of people are having serious issues and I am trying to narrow it down.

------------------

[bobette]

>IS your VM on or OFF?

OFF

>Do you have ALL the recent software updates by Apple?

Yup.

>Do you have Disk Burner and iTunes installed?

DB: no. iTunes:yes

>Have you tried to use it on a G4?

Nope. Heard it's cool though...

>WHERE does the Myst read me tell you to insall the Blink extention yourself?

I didn't read the readme. If the Blink extension is in there, you need it. I already had mine since Oni. That's probably one of the changes (for the mac side) on the upcoming replacement cd: blink installer.

Personally? M3 worked fine on first install on both machines.

Good luck!

[Skywalkers new Hand]

I narrowed the problem down a little more. With VM ON in 9.1 it will crash. With VM on in 9.04 it is fine.

It is very buggy with QuickTime 5.01 Pro on G4's with 9.1.

You do not need to install the Blink extention, it is fine withough it. That is for special hardware that I am looking into.

With a CLEAN 9.1, VM off and QuickTime 4 it is fine though.

------------------

[zac4mac]

Thanks for that link , bobette.
Saves me the trouble of burning a copy to play from.
No problem here, plays fine(major understatement).
DP550/Radeon/1 GB RAM(no VM)

------------------

[bobette]

zac, exactly my intent by ordering it, makes for a practical carry-on playdisc for a laptop.

[Skywalkers new Hand]

Here is a copy of my letter to Ubisoft:

Hello,

I purchased Myst: 3 Exile on Friday only to come home and not be able to play it due to a collection of serious bugs.

After talking (and paying long distance charges) to UbiSoft’s technical soft for nearly an hour they offered no useful suggestion other then “Allocating as much memory as I can to the QuickTime extensions”. They hadn’t even heard of any Mac Specific bugs as of Friday night. I have been browsing the web and have found countless other Mac users having the exact same problems so I know that I am not having a rare or isolated case.

My symptoms are as follows:
The game launches and 2 cursors are visible, 1 is my normal Mac OS arrow, the other is the games hand cursor. They are not the same distance from one another consistently and only one of them functions.
The games video is very choppy and the sound cuts in and out.
The game hard crashes right after the into. Or when loading a saved game.
When quitting the game the monitors resolution is restored from 640 x 480 but it loses all of your pop-up folders and your desktop in a complete mess.

My computer meets and exceeds all of the system requirements.
The system which I am experiencing all these problems on are as follows:

PowerMac G4, 450MHz
448 Megs of RAM
15’ LCD Studio Display
Mac OS 9.1 with all the latest software updates (problems experienced with Mac OS 9.1 BASE and 9.1 ALL extensions sets. No 3rd party installs)
Itunes and Disk burner installed.
40 Gig hard drive with 30 Gigs free.
QuickTime 5.01 Pro

After receiving no useful help from Ubisoft’s technical support I spent the next few hours trouble shooting the situation. This is the conclusion that I have have come to to solve all the problems.

The double cursor error can be caused by a dialog box appearing in the background when the game is running. Such as when the game first launches the Finder gives notification that your Pop-up folders will be lost as the game changes the resolution. Quitting Myst and dismissing the dialog then relauching should solve the problem. A-Dock control panel also can cause this problem if you move your cursor to the bottom of the screen when the game is running.
The choppy video and some crashing is caused by QuickTime 5.01. Downgrading to the QuickTime 4 that is on the Myst disk 1 should solve the problem.
The Myst read me says that if you only have 64 megs of RAM then enabling Virtual memory will offer improved performance. This is what causes the crashes in many cases. Virtual memory works fine if you have system 9.04. If however you are running VM in 9.1 then you will experience a hard crash the second any QuickTime movie loads.

So far the ideal solution to get rid of ALL errors for me is to run Mac OS 9.1 with VM off, no third party extensions and QuickTime 4.

Unfortunately it took me hours and countless crashes to figure this out. I am extremely disappointed in Ubisoft for not properly testing the game before shipping it. The QuickTime 5 error is understandable as it had not shipped yet when the game was being printed. However the tech support staff should have tested it in the past 20 days that QuickTime 5 has been out and posted a note on the site. It also seems as this game was only tested on a 9.04 system in their labs as VM on in 9.1 crashes the game instantly.

I also do not feel good about the fact that I purchased this game to enjoy and not to do hours of beta testing for UbiSoft.

On Saturday Ubisoft posted a note on their support site letting you order a free replacement Disk 1 that fixes a majority of the bugs (which they do not list). As they hadn’t heard of any Mac bugs on Friday night, I have a hard time believing that this will fix any Mac related problems.

------------------