Having played Myst V on my PPC PowerMac Dual 2.7 GHz G5 twice previously, I thought I would do it once again. Unfortunately, near the beginning of the game I turned left at the bright "lamp" on the floor where lies the first volume of Yeesha's journal. Picked up the journal; no problem. Turned left, and instantly my cursor froze, and so did the computer. Never had a problem before; same "stock" video card (ATI 9650 from Apple) and same ATI software. I am running Mac OS X v 10.4.9 with Security Update 2007-4 installed. I will continue from a previously saved game by not turning left at that particular place, but have a sneaking suspicion this will happen again somewhere else in the game. Could be a real bummer if this keeps happening.

[Edit: Yep, happened again as Yeesha walked into the D'ni bubble. The video froze with her back to me, although not only did the audio continue, apparently from the sounds I heard I was in the "restful" Age about to meet Esher. At that point I shut down the computer.]

Any ideas?

This message has been edited. Last edited by: wstrohm,

I really don´t know where the problem is since I have never used a MAC but I think that maybe the problem could be with the Dual Core processor but I honestly not really sure. have cheked if there any dual core fixes I don´t know in the apple OSX page or something?

Thanks for your response, detonator. I did have the dual-processor problem with Myst III: Exile, but solved that with the help of a forum member by downloading an Apple product called "CHUD Tools." That gave me an option to turn one processor off. However, I have played Myst V on this computer before, using both CPUs, and it worked fine.

Well, I have reinstalled Myst V; same problem; random freezes in the video with audio continuing. Reinstalled Mac OS X v 10.4.9; no help. Turned off everything I can turn off in System Preferences; no help. And this DVD is the same one that worked perfectly, on this same computer, the first time I played. Have no clue what to do next. Is there a Mac patch for Myst V, perhaps for the latest version of the Mac OS?

[Edit 4/30/07: Tried downgrading to Mac OS X 10.4.8 and QuickTime 7.0; no help. Then upgraded only QuickTime to 7.1.5; different type of failure... instead of screen freezing, it went black, and a strange pulsing buzzing sound appeared. Upgraded back to 10.4.9 again, and went back to the original freezing problem. Freezing occurs randomly, not at the same place in program. Sometimes during animation, sometimes not.] Am now suspecting the ATI driver supplied with the OS, which was updated with Mac OS X 10.4.8, might be the problem.]

This message has been edited. Last edited by: wstrohm,

Found a great improvement by replacing a file with a later version (from an earlier Mac OS X version!). In System/Library/Extensions/AppleNDRV, there is a file named "ATI ROM Extension." For some strange reason, Mac OS X v 10.4.9 contains version 1.2.2f2 of this file, whereas an earlier version of OS X contains version 1.2.7f2. By replacing the earlier file with the later one, Myst V now runs (almost) perfectly. There was some stumbling in the video of the Yeesha monologue scene at the beginning of the game, but it recovered by itself, and I am now in Taghira with no further freezes.

[Edit 05/03/07: Unfortunately shortly after I wrote this, the program froze again. Since that time, I have tried ALL versions of the Mac OS X, from 10.4.0 through 10.4.9, with their corresponding ATI graphics driver bundles, which ran from version 1.4 through 1.4.18. None of those combinations allow continuous play of Myst V. Today I will add 1 GB of RAM to my G5 and see if that helps. But Myst V ran fine a year or so ago... cannot find anything that should be causing the problem. TechTool v 4.1.2, Disk Warrior v 3.0.3, and Apple Disk Utility say everything is fine with my system. If anyone has any ideas, I would appreciate knowing what you are thinking.]

This message has been edited. Last edited by: wstrohm,

Well, I went out & bought 1 GB of Kingston DDR SDRAM and installed it. Now I have 1.5 GB of RAM, but the game still occasionally freezes, forcing a reboot. I opened Activity Monitor and killed some background processes, but it didn't help. It's still a MYSTery.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: wstrohm,