The "Real" Version of Myst

After about 10 years of not owning it, I finally bought a copy of realMyst. The Macintosh version to be precise. Yes, I know it's on GoG, but I'm a tangible sort of guy and like holding the disc in my hand. Also, I don't want to tempt the Wine Gods who have so callously decided to infuriate me (Not the developers, they have put together a fabulous program. I think X11 on Mac OS X just sucks :P). So, I put it in my mostly reliable MacBook Pro and ran the installer. (Recap: MacBook Pro, June 2009, running Snow Leopard, Rosetta is installed.) Everything was going smooth until I tried running the application. It crashed immediately.

The next logical step was to run the application via the console. However this was no standard Mac OS X app. Running it would give the "cannot execute" error. Running "file" on it gave "header for PowerPC PEF executable." That is the old executable format used in previous versions of Mac OS as well as the early Mac OS X versions (10.0 and 10.1). Looking online, I found that there's an app called "LaunchCFMApp" that can launch the old PEF executables.

Of course, Murphy's Law dictates that this can't possibly work. And of course it didn't. It gave me an error: "Launch failed with error code -2856 (cfragRsrcForkErr)" -- that error means that the application can't find the resource fork. I checked the file, and the resource fork is clearly present. I then asked a friend for help. He was able to get it to run, but I still wasn't.

Searching a bit more on Google revealed that there was a 1.1.1 patch for the game. I installed that, and voila! I saw the "launcher" of sorts where I could choose graphics quality, resolution, and color depth. Nothing is ever that easy. Starting it would crash or just lead to a black screen. Until randomly it "just" worked. Probably something screwy going on in the background, but I'll take a functioning game. I was elated as I saw the SunSoft logo followed by the classic Cyan logo.

I proceeded to beat the game in under 5 minutes, as usual. :P

And now the obligatory screenshots:
EDIT: I also visited the new Rime age. The Riven image is a bit weird, not sure why. It's clearly Temple Island, though.

EDIT 2: Turns out LaunchCFMApp works fine in Snow Leopard as long as you feed it an absolute path and not a relative path. Seems the Resource Manager doesn't like relative paths anymore...