[Not A Speck Of Cereal]

I just successfully installed and configured this game for compatibility--ready to go.

My, that was a quick install; on no, disk swap with a 5 CD set!! I haven't done one of those since the 90s. Oh well. We searches for full-install tricks didn't pan out, so I'm going for it. It's a bit of a walk to the drive... shades of the first edition of Riven.

Any advice (not hints)? Is it a big note-taking thing, or do I just play it one puzzle at a time? I fear the former...

Edit: yes, this is my first time with this game.

[Melanie68]

I installed it on XP and it wouldn't run. I haven't gone back to it to try and get it to work though.

Sorry, that didn't answer your question.

[Not A Speck Of Cereal]

Setup didn't even work for me (XP eventually told me that the WOW 16-bit layer became corrupt). A reboot got me past that.

Then it complained about not having Quicktime 2.x or later installed, so I uninstalled 7.x and installed the version on the CD.

I also applied these instructions and dropped the bit-depth of my video from 32-bit to 16-bit.

Then it worked.

[Fien]

Originally Posted by Not A Speck Of Cereal

Any advice (not hints)? Is it a big note-taking thing, or do I just play it one puzzle at a time? I fear the former...

No note-taking. Except for one or two very hard puzzles. Although Obsidian qualifies as a "Mystian game" (lonely explorartion, no inventory, no dialogue) it really is not at all that much like Myst or Riven. For starters, you are a woman with a name and a face. Nothing to read either, except in the intro. The game won't let you continue until you have read all the background info you need later to make sense of the different realms.

Savour it. You won't find another Obsidian. And always remember:

YOUR RULES DO NOT APPLY HERE...

[Melanie68]

Originally Posted by Not A Speck Of Cereal

Setup didn't even work for me (XP eventually told me that the WOW 16-bit layer became corrupt). A reboot got me past that.

Then it complained about not having Quicktime 2.x or later installed, so I uninstalled 7.x and installed the version on the CD.

I also applied these instructions and dropped the bit-depth of my video from 32-bit to 16-bit.

Then it worked.

Cool! I'll give that a go. Thanks.

[crabapple]

From this Googlegroups message

I was not able to run Obsidian just from a hard drive without the use of a CD emulator. However, if you set up all five disks as emulated CDs the
game runs nicely just from a hard drive.

That would eliminate the CD swapping.
Or if you don't want to use virtual drives, but have more than one optical drive in the computer, you could use both of them and cut down on the swapping.

[Fairygdmther]

Originally Posted by Fienepien

No note-taking. Except for one or two very hard puzzles. Although Obsidian qualifies as a "Mystian game" (lonely explorartion, no inventory, no dialogue) it really is not at all that much like Myst or Riven. For starters, you are a woman with a name and a face. Nothing to read either, except in the intro. The game won't let you continue until you have read all the background info you need later to make sense of the different realms.

Savour it. You won't find another Obsidian. And always remember:

YOUR RULES DO NOT APPLY HERE...

^ what she said! Truly unique game, and my all-time favorite!

FGM

[Crapstorm]

Yes! You're in for quite a rare treat, Speck. Obsidian is like a mad dream. People often talk about innovation in adventure games (usually in the sole context of graphics), but Obsidian is a true trailblazer. It brought artistic surrealism into the genre, and it did it without compromising anything. Plus, it's got a number of the cleverest puzzles in adventure game history. A masterpiece.

[Not A Speck Of Cereal]

Originally Posted by crabapple

From this Googlegroups message

That would eliminate the CD swapping.

Yes! Thanks bunches, I'll give it a try.

[Not A Speck Of Cereal]

Originally Posted by Not A Speck Of Cereal

Yes! Thanks bunches, I'll give it a try.

This worked like a charm. First, I created ISO images of each disc with this tool:

http://isorecorder.alexfeinman.com/v2.htm

This will install a Windows Explorer extension (right click on a folder you've copied a CD to, select Create ISO Image File).

Then I used this free virtual CD control panel from Microsoft (which required the above ISO app).

http://download.microsoft.com/downlo...olpanel_21.exe

See the readme.txt in the self-extracting zip. With 5 ISO files, I created 5 virtual CD players.

RAWK!

ps: I now have 19 drive letters used up on this box.