This topic apparently got "lost" as a result of the recent eve equipment (database server) failure, so I'll repost my reply.
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Myst
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The game was originally released in 1993 (on CD's) and is therefore somewhat primitive by today's standards. It uses a "point/click/go there" navigation system, in which you interact with the game through a series of static, pre-rendered images (although you can look around within an image) to solve puzzles and advance in the game. The "point/click/go there" navigation system means that it's not a real-time graphics game like Myst V, in that you move from place to place on a zap-to-a-new-location basis instead of walking to the new location in real time.

realMyst
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It's the same game - the puzzles are the same and the Linking Books are the same, and it's still on CD's. The primary attraction of this release is a new 3D engine, with real-time graphics, freedom of movement, and relatively dynamic environments, much like Myst V. The benefits of the new engine are limited to the visuals, however, and the downside is that on some PC's, the engine runs slowly and causes the game to drag.

Myst Masterpiece Edition
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This release is a remastering of the original game, with 24-bit color graphics, 16-bit sound, and full compatibility with Windows XP. The music has been digitally remastered and new sound effects added. Color is much better than the original, and the movies and animations are larger and higher-quality. A DigitalGuide in-game help system has been added, with the level of help ranging from broad hints to specific solutions. Also included is Myst: The Book of Atrus, a prequel written by Myst designers Rand and Robyn Miller, which explains the background underlying the Myst world. The original "point/click/go there" navigation is still used, however. Myst Masterpiece Edition is part of the Myst 10th Anniversary DVD Edition, which also contains Riven: Sequel to Myst and Myst III: Exile.

IMHO, your best value is the Myst 10th Anniversary DVD Edition, since you also get Riven and Exile. But if you want real-time animation and don't want "point/click/go there" navigation, your only choice is realMyst. It's currently available on eBay, Amazon, et al.

> Myst Masterpiece Edition
> ------------------------
> This release is a remastering of the original game, with 24-bit color graphics, 16-bit sound, and full compatibility with Windows XP. Color is much better than the original, and the movies and animations are larger and higher-quality.



Actually, I am still trying to find proof of this. Can anyone actually verify that the graphics are 24 bit 'remastered', and that the movies and animations are higher quality? I have MME and I have been looking closely at the images as well as the movies and I do not see how they have been improved.

I wouldn't really care that much if Cyan just remarketed Myst as a 'remastered' version, but I am wondering if there really is a 24 bit remastered version out there? I am not sure if what I have is a 'real' Myst Masterpiece.

JR

Never mind...

(Why do you always find your answer right after you post!)

I found this site:

http://cho.cyan.com/RAWA/MystCompare.html

I went to the exact image and did the comparison...definitely higher resolution.

JR

I just couldn't let it go...

Using an image extractor, I looked at a few images from Myst (and Riven) from the 'Masterpiece' edition and discovered they are in 256/8 bit color. You can verify this without an image extractor by doing a screen capture of a slide during gameplay, and converting it to 256 optimized color...it's the same.

What started this was the astonishingly poor quality of the video sequences I was getting when I was assuming they were 'remastered'. A good comparison would be the realMyst video when you go to D'ni and you are asked for the page...it is 'stunning' compared to the Myst Masterpiece video.

I have a Mac and a PC and I have been going back and forth to determine if it was a platform issue, etc. and it is not. I then went to the ubisoft website to look at the specs for the 10th anniversary edition, and it does not mention anywhere that the images and/or video were remastered...it just states that it was "Remastered to include an electronic hint guide".

I'm afraid this has become an urban legend of a sort. They are the same graphics.

Please, someone correct me if I am wrong (with some proof!).

JR

It seems to me there are graphical differences between my 1993 copy of Myst and my 2000 copy (CD) of MME. Not necessarily better, just different. I will try a couple of screen captures to confirm that.

[Edit: I just took two pics in my original Myst and two identical pics in MME. The only difference I can see is (I think) due to running the original in 256 colors, and MME in "Thousands" of colors. (Mac Dual 2.7 GHz G5, Mac OS X 10.4.7, Quicktime 6.0.3 in the Classic Extensions folder for both cases.) In 256 colors, the Mac's screen looks a bit like colored newspaper print, and the screenshots taken in the original Myst look the same way. That effect disappears in MME, so the pics look better. If you want the pics, send me an e-Mail at wstrohm@socal.rr.com, and I will attach them in a reply.]

Gameseek.co.uk
New Features:
* Every graphic element has been upgraded to brilliant 24-bit colour.
* New sound effects and an original soundtrack enhance the sense of realism.
* Digitally remastered music heightens the gameplay experience.
* Larger and higher quality movies and animations.

Startup Software Online
Myst Masterpiece Edition PC CD ROM
• Witness the beauty of Myst in brilliant 24-bit color.
• Fall under the spell of Myst’s haunting music—now digitally remastered!
• Experience phenomenal audio-realism with new 16-bit sound effects.
• Discover entirely re-rendered animation sequences and larger movies.

Amazon.co.uk
Product Features
• Every graphic element has been upgraded to brilliant 24-bit colour.
• Now (new?)sound effects and an original soundtrack enhance the sense of realism.
• Digitally remastered music heightens the gameplay experience.
• Larger and higher quality movies and animations.
• Proprietary Digital Guide help system assists players of every skill level.

Planet CD*ROM
Product Features:
• Digital guide with multiple levels of help makes Myst more accessible than ever.
• Brilliant 24-bit color graphics enhance an already beautiful world.
• Digitally re-mastered music for a heightened sense of mystery and intrigue.
• New 16-bit sound effects enhance the sense of realism like never before.
• Entirely re-rendered animation sequences and larger movies bring this masterpiece edition to life

Focus
New Features:
• Every graphic element has been upgraded to brilliant 24-bit colour.
• New sound effects and an original soundtrack enhance the sense of realism.
• Digitally remastered music heightens the gameplay experience.
• Larger and higher quality movies and animations.

Games4Girls
The ambient sounds for the original game created a startling reality and these effects are now even better - clearer.

The graphics for Myst island and the four worlds, called ages, are superb. It's hard to realize that Myst was originally done back in 1993. This Masterpiece Edition has upgraded the graphics to sparkling 24 bit color making the clues stand out much better. There are more maps - no more doing quick sketches to get the lay of the land (you gals are so lucky) and the fly over animations of the worlds have been enhanced to provide lots more useful details.

Software Blowouts and More
• Brilliant 24-bit color graphics enhance an already beautiful world.
• Digitally remastered music for a heightened sense of mystery and intrigue.
• New 16-bit sound effects enhance the sense of realism like never before.
• Entirely re-rendered animation sequences and larger movies bring this masterpiece edition to life.

MobyGames
This is a remake of the Myst adventure from the Windows 3.1 platforms. They've added a whole new engine in the game, with many new options and things that may be of some big help. Not to mention better sound, and 24-bit graphics instead of 8-bit 256 colors.

Four Fat Chicks
Seeking to capitalize on the previous success of Myst now that it's fallen off the bestseller charts, Mindscape has released an updated version called Myst Masterpiece. The enhanced version is the same game with the same puzzles, but the graphics are now 24-bit, the music has been remastered, new sound effects have been added, and the game now installs and plays very easily in Win95/98.

Nothing But Software
Product Features
• Brilliant 24-bit color graphics enhance an already beautiful world.
• Digitally remastered music for a heightened sense of mystery and intrigue.
• New 16-bit sound effects enhance the sense of realism like never before.
• Entirely re-rendered animation sequences and larger movies bring this masterpiece edition to life.

Cheats Wire, for the MAC
Myst Masterpiece for the Mac is a straightforward transfer of Myst Masterpiece for Windows -- a port of an update of a port. The end product does have more-detailed pictures than the original Mac version, using full 24-bit color images. Ironically, these often look *worse* than the original's 8-bit images! In technical terms: Because they didn't have high-end graphics workstations when they created Myst, Cyan had to render the scenes from simplified, relatively low-resolution 3D models -- fewer polygons and lower-resolution texture images. To fit all the pictures on one CD, they downsampled the 24-bit master renderings to 8-bit dithered images, and the dithering added just enough noise to mask the lack of design detail (with the approximate effect of photographic film grain, not at all offensive to the eye). Conversely, the 24-bit images show every little technical and artistic shortcut in stark detail, giving many scenes a pronouncedly less realistic appearance.

Hexafind.com
Myst: Masterpiece Edition was an updated version of Myst, with re-rendered images in high color (million colors) instead of 256, newly rendered point-of-view images, better audio effects and music, a hint system and maps.

MAC Game Database
A new version of the classic computer game with enhanced graphics and sound. It is the original MYST with multimedia enhancements to create a richer experience.

the CD-ROM SHOP
Features:
• Brilliant 24-bit color graphics enhance an already beautiful world.
• Digitally remastered music for a heightened sense of mystery and intrigue.
• New 16-bit sound effects enhance the sense of realism like never before.
• Entirely re-rendered animation sequences and larger movies bring this Masterpiece Edition to life.

E-Deals USA, Inc.
Features: Myst Masterpiece Edition . .
• Brilliant 24-bit color graphics enhance an already beautiful world.
• Digitally remastered music for a heightened sense of mystery and intrigue.
• New 16-bit sound effects enhance the sense of realism like never before.
• Entirely re-rendered animation sequences and larger movies bring this masterpiece edition to life.

Yes, but not one of these references is 'official', which is how this type of information gets distorted...someone starts it, and then someone quotes them, and so on, and so on.

I did another test to prove that these are nothnig more than the original 256 color 8 bit images. I simply set my monitor to 256 colors, and started Myst/Riven, and the quality was EXACTLY the same.

I was hoping I was wrong, but I don't think so. The images/movies/and sounds are exactly the same, and possibly just 'up-converted' if at all. What I would really like to see is TRUE remastered versions of Myst and Riven.

JR

I did notice the sound was quite a bit improved, but I definitely did NOT see an improvement in the graphics of the average "slide," other than the difference in quality running my computer at "thousands" of colors when taking the screenshots in MME vs. 256 colors in the original Myst. (The original will NOT run unless color depth is set to 256 colors.)

Here is a quick image test that I put together to show what I am referring to:

http://www.runtimeeditor.com/Myst/PC_images.html

This is not a big issue to me, but I would love to see a 'real' re-mastered version of Riven for sure...

I think you are right about the sounds. They seem to be up-converted to 16 bit, although they are still 22khz.

JR

I see a slight improvement in detail of both the walkway and the stone at the right of the picture on the 24-bit picture, relative to the 256-bit picture. But I thought Riven was not an issue... my original version's user manual states that on a PC the color depth requirement is "High Color," and for a Mac it is "thousands of colors." So I believe the original Riven graphics were done in at least 16-bit color.

The dithering on the images in Myst was pretty well-done, so even though the images in the original release of the game from 1993 were 8-bit images, they looked pretty close to their 24-bit originals. That said, I've extracted the actual image files from MME using a program called Riveal, written by another community member, and the images in MME are most definitely the 24-bit originals. I compared a couple of them to the shots RAWA has posted on a few pages on the Cho server, and also converted one of them to a 256-color GIF image, and the difference in quality is quite noticeable (had it already been a 256-color image, there shouldn't have been a drop in quality). I can upload a comparison shot if you really want one... and if you give me 2 weeks, I can get you a photo of the box back from Cyan's collection .

I should note, too, that the MME box did in fact state that the game was using the original 24-bit images, as did the official website, back in the day (unfortunately, the official website now redirects to Myst Worlds, and the Wayback Machine doesn't like saving images, which is pretty much what the entire site was made up of, and I don't happen to own a non-bundled copy of the game, or I'd have a box to scan). The videos have been re-compressed in many cases, but not really "improved" beyond that... the only instance where video dimensions actually increased was the inclusion of the new full-screen fly-bys for each Age. A similar "improved" level of video quality was introduced with the Riven DVD, though the difference is really just in the size of the compression ratio, leading to a slightly smaller fuzz to the playback. Unfortunately, there's only so much that can be done for the in-game cinematics, since they were filmed in 1992, and the source data was probably either highly compressed to begin with or simply not of terribly high quality given the budget their production had at the time. The sequences in realMYST with Atrus in them were re-filmed because they needed to integrate Atrus into a realtime room, and there was simply no way to do that with any consistency using the original source video from Myst.

Riven's images were also dithered, though I believe that was more of a space-saving decision than a read-speed decision, as the videos are all rendered in at least 16-bit color. When your game is already spanning 5 CDs because of the choice to use uncompressed BMP files for the still shots (and admittedly, I can't argue with that choice... Exile has several rather blatant areas of JPEG compression in it because the node stills were saved in a lossy file format, which looks worse in some cases even though the bit-depth is higher), saving space is an important thing. Riven's images, unlike Myst's, were each optimized individually, whereas Myst's were optimized using a single 256-color palette for each Age.

Also, you may want to check out this page in RAWA's collection of stuff for a few additional notes on the dithering applied to Myst and Riven's images.

I guess what I am seeing in my screenshots of the original Myst stills is the result of having to take the screenshot in 256 color mode of my Mac, since Myst won't run otherwise. It does look like "dithering," based on what I saw in RAWA's pics. Even though I "play it back" using Graphic Converter at 16 bits, I "recorded" it at 256 bits. MME is in 16-bit color when the screenshot is taken, so it looks much better. (Even my Mac's background screen at 640 x 480 resolution and in 256-color depth looks pretty bad. I guess I'm spoiled...)

quote:

Originally posted by wstrohm:
I guess what I am seeing in my screenshots of the original Myst stills is the result of having to take the screenshot in 256 color mode of my Mac, since Myst won't run otherwise. It does look like "dithering," based on what I saw in RAWA's pics. Even though I "play it back" using Graphic Converter at 16-bit, I "recorded" it at 8-bit. MME is in 16-bit color when the screenshot is taken, so it looks much better. (Even my Mac's background screen at 640 x 480 resolution and in 256-color depth looks pretty bad. I guess I'm spoiled...)

quote:

Originally posted by johnrule:
Yes, but not one of these references is 'official'....

The publisher of at least the 26/9/2003 UK release of MME was Focus Multimedia Ltd. As noted above from their website:
Myst Masterpiece Edition
New Features:
• Every graphic element has been upgraded to brilliant 24-bit colour.
• New sound effects and an original soundtrack enhance the sense of realism.
• Digitally remastered music heightens the gameplay experience.
• Larger and higher quality movies and animations.

Is that, combined with Alah's "...the images in MME are most definitely the 24-bit originals", 'official' enough?

> Is that, combined with Alah's "...the images in MME are most definitely the 24-bit originals", 'official' enough?

I am not convinced (although your detective work is appreciated). I used the image extractor you mentioned first, but I also used 'RivImage' which allows you to copy the image to the clipboard. When you use this method, it is copied in (what I believe) the native resolution...256 color @ 8 bit.

Sorry to cause such a fuss, but the quality is bugging me. Take a look at the images from the link below:

http://www.runtimeeditor.com/Myst/realMyst_images.html

I also have realMyst (PC and Mac) and the rendered quality is far superior to the still images of the (supposedly) 24 bit images in Myst. My point is that there should be NO graininess whatsoever in a 'true' 24 bit image. These artifacts can only come from conversion and compression.

The images in the last versions of Myst and Riven are 256 color @ 8 bit, possibly upconverted to 24 bit.

JR

24-bit PNG Image comparing the extracted file from MME (which was JPEG compressed by the extractor), the same file as a 256-color GIF image with diffusion dithering, and the 256-color image from the game as provided by RAWA on his website, which was also JPG compressed, creating additional artifacting and nastiness. All three are blown up to 3x their original size to emphasize the differences.

Something to remember, when playing Myst in either its original or "Masterpiece" format, is that the game was originally created between 1991 and 1993, and MME simply uses the original 24-bit renders rather than the dithered-down 8-bit pictures. In 1993, high-resolution textures were not commonly used outside of Hollywood, and most definitely not in a garage game built by 4 people using their Macintosh computers, Photoshop 1.0, and StrataVision. As a result, you're going to see texture pixelation and stretching, even in the 24-bit original files. realMYST uses MUCH larger and higher-quality textures than were even commonly available in 1993, and as a result, it's going to look better pretty much by default (and that was kind of the intention). What you're seeing in your source image of Myst is not dithering or artifacting caused by color reduction on the final image, but simply the limitations of 1993-era consumer-level rendering software showing its limitations. No amount of color improvement can fix problems caused by low-resolution textures .

[edit] Remember, too, that in realMYST, you have control over the level of antialiasing being used by the game as it renders, while Myst's antialiasing level was fixed at render time... in 1993. The images have NOT been re-rendered, but they ARE using the 24-bit originals... so what you're seeing in the game is the images as they were rendered in 1993, before anything else was done to them. I would think it obvious that pre-rendered stills from 1993 (especially from a garage-built game) would pale in comparison to anything from 2000, even realtime images.