[Antrax]

There is advice all over the internet about how it "should" work. However, I have installed (on an XP Pro host) MS Virtual PC 2004 with my old copy of Win 95. The game loads, there's graphics and everything, but there's no sound in the movies.
This is the same for both Myst and Myst Masterpiece Edition. I've installed the versions of QT/DirectX that come bundled with them.
If it helps, it's probably a directsound issue - when running dxdiag, some of the sound tests play but some don't. This coincides with the fact that in the game, I can here some of the atmospheric noise but not others.

So, has anyone successfully done it? Has anyone encountered this particular problem? Will upgrading DX help, or is it more likely to screw the game up?

[Sughly]

I recently picked up Myst masterpiece edition and couldn't get it to work properly, and from what I could find out across various forums it seems most people struggle to get it going. I'd changed all these settings in Quicktime and changed compatibilities and done all that kind of jazz but the best I got was a functioning game with sound that would sometimes freeze momentarily while the sound just made this intensely annoying squeal.

My answer was realMYST. It's not the best answer but I reckon it's a pretty nice update on the series (in that it's all realtime 3D) and plays beautifully. Obviously there's better options but picking that up would be my recommendation. Sorry if it's not much help, but it's probable you'll spend much wasted time and energy on getting masterpiece edition going properly.

[Antrax]

Thanks Sughly - ironically you pushed me in the right direction.
Short version: Reinstalling DirectX and choosing to override the sound drivers despite the warning that it's not recommended will allow you to run the game with full sound. This can be done before every time the game is ran, or you can keep it running in the VM and do save state every time.

Long version: I went to read on what Realmyst is, and whether it's native to WinXP. Then I found out about a patch for Myst Masterpiece in the Myst forums, installed it, found out it's meant for running it on XP SP2 and not an emulated Win95, which forced me to uninstall the game and reinstall it, at which point I got no sound at all, so I uninstalled DirectX and reinstalled it, at which point I read the warning thoroughly instead of mindlessly going with the default recommended action and voila. Rebooting the virtual machine ended the magic, but reinstalling DX every time to play is not that big of a deal, plus you can always save state.

[Sughly]

Originally Posted by Antrax

Thanks Sughly - ironically you pushed me in the right direction.

Haha, glad I could be of help

I'd still recommend trying to play realMYST... somehow, at some point, if you can. T'was fun/ well made, and though I'm no die hard myst fan I think it does it justice.

[nonax]

Originally Posted by Antrax

So, has anyone successfully done it? Has anyone encountered this particular problem? Will upgrading DX help, or is it more likely to screw the game up?

You triggered me. I took my old Myst Masterpiece Edition, dusted it of, and installed in a VirtualBox running XP. The good thing about Virtual Box is that it supports direct 3D - although still in beta. It also supports the modern CPU virtualization technologies VT-x and AMD-V.
The game works fine in the virtual machine. I do hear music and sounds in the video sequences, although they sound very bad. Like coming from an internal speaker.
I noticed that during setup you are required to install QuickTime. My guess is that the video sequences are all in QuickTime. Maybe you should try to install the original QuickTime from the CD or the latest one from Apple.

PS: VirtualBox is a free open source virtual machine from Sun. Get it from virtualbox.org

[Antrax]

Thanks. As mentioned in the first post in the thread, I installed the versions of DirectX and Quicktime that came bundled with the software. I haven't tried installing the latest and greatest from Apple, though.