Since the eagerly anticipated release of Myst III: Exile earlier this month, many users (both PC and Mac) have had an experience fraught with difficulties and bugs. UbiSoft have already announced that replacements for Disk One would be available in the near future and an early patch has been released; both of these fixes are for the PC version only. Roland Gustafsson, Lead Programmer for Myst III has commented on some of these problems - and suggested solutions - at MacFixIt.com. Here is an excerpt:

Regarding the disc update: "A new version of the Mac application exists as well, but an installer/updater has not been created for it yet. So far there have been no Mac-specific fixes, only PC-specific and some very minor 'cross-platform' buglets. Two Mac specific problems I'm working on are desktop icon position scrambling and Voodoo 3 OpenGL support."

Regarding the skipping audio: "The audio in Myst III uses a fair bit of bandwidth. The benchmark we used during development was the original iMac. I have a rev B iMac and the music and ambient sound plays without missing a beat, the sound that plays in movies that are part of a 360 degree node, however, hesitate occasionally on this iMac and other "slower" machines. This was a trade-off between visual artifacting or audio dropouts."

Regarding virtual memory and QuickTime versions: "I see no reason why QT5 would be causing problems, I tested the game with QT5beta a few months ago and everything worked fine. Virtual Memory is never a good thing with sound-intensive applications such as Myst III. (During gameplay there are cases where up to 10 sound files are streaming from the hard disk!) The game itself needs 64MB and OpenGL and the Mac OS need another 64MB or so...so the game runs best if you have at least 128MB of RAM. Most of the problems reported can be solved with more memory, using the latest version of OpenGL (1.2.1) and turning off virtual memory. I've noticed that some suggest upping the RAM setting for the game beyond the default 64MB. This is unnecessary and may actually cause problems."

OS X native version coming: "The OS X native version of Myst III is up and running, there is only one performance issue remaining that requires an update to OS X. When this issue is fixed in an update to OS X, the application will be available for download."

UbiSoft Myst III FAQ

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