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Running Riven On XP

Here’s how I was able to get Riven: The Sequel To Myst (the five CD disk set, circa 1997) running on my Windows XP laptop and under Parallels on my Mac OS X box, also running XP, directly from hard drive so as to avoid swapping out CDs during gameplay.

  • Install Riven as normal via its installer.
  • Allow Riven setup to also install Quicktime (or, manually install from CD 1). Now, apparently, Riven will only run under Quicktime 2; it will complain if it detects any other versions and refuse to run. In my case, it didn’t like 7.5, so I had to install the version that came with Riven. Fortunately, it seems multiple versions of Quicktime can co-exist just fine. (There may be a way to trick Riven, but the method didn’t work for me.)
  • Copy all .mhk files from each CD, located in the Data directory, to the Riven installation on the hard drive (if you used the defaults during installation, that will be C:\Program Files\Riven\data).
  • Modify riven.cfg and under ;Data file sets section, change all Disc settings to 0:

  • Riven should now run from hard drive on XP, with full sound and movies.

I had one initial issue with Riven on my laptop. Upon launch, the game would attempt to go full screen, but then abort and minimize with some Windows dialog box. Unfortunately, it would just kill itself, and I couldn’t read the popup quick enough. Turns out it was the flat panel warning:

To fix this, I changed the screen size temporarily to a smaller resolution and disabled the message by checking the box. Upon running Riven again, I was able to enter setup and turned off 640×480 Resolution option. Works fine now.