The Journeyman Project 3 - Legacy of Time (1)

This scene never took place in the game

So playing all these old adventure games got me craving for one of the better ones I could remember from my childhood and one I actually completed, The Journeyman Project 3 - Legacy of Time. Why we got the game in the first case was thanks to Myst. We bought the sequel Riven and on that game was a demo for this game since both game was published by Red Orb Entertainment. So looking through my parents game collection (more like my fathers game collection) I'm able to locate our original 4 disc version of the game and I put them in the external cd-drive for our Mac. Disc doesn't read. I take it out and look at the back, it's scratched, they are all scratched.

Scratches, a gamers nightmare

So I began searching the internet for tips and tricks to solve this. It was toothpaste there, vaseline here and god knows what. The only thing that happened was that the game at least wasn't booted out of the drive, but the files was horrible damaged. Apparently the original package case wasn't the most optimum place to store the cd's in. Probably for the best as well since I learnt that the current Mac OS X ain't backwards compatible. So what do you do as a person with a broken game and an internet connection? You download a digital version of course. Sadly non works of the current Macs, only windows. So I began researching and finds out about this nifty little program called Wine. It somehow tricks the computer to think it's windows based for that program. How neat. So I set out installing and downloading the softwares I need for this and forces myself through a very loose guide on Terminal to get it running.

Where were the green colours?

I'm able to install the game and start it up, I hear the intro music and click a new game. A box without text in my way. I knew there was some trouble with the text in the box and pushed on. Hmm.... seems like we skipped the intro movie, but at least I'm at the beginning of the game, but there is still a box in the way. I press escape and flickering by I can see a "switch cd box" and I realise it doesn't work. Failure. Alright, so I'm not the best computer geek that can whip out some mad hacker skills. I need some help... to the internet. So I look around and apparently some are pointing toward a tool called wine bottler. Supposedly it creates an app around the program that you then launches. So I thought, maybe if I put all the information inside the app it will work like ScummVM and such. I get that, goes through a much simpler program, creates an app that even have the game logo and start it up. The music is heard, I click New Game and... same problem again. No cd's detected. Well duh, there ain't none besides my scratched ones. Same problem and of to the internet again. I'm pointed toward Wineskin and get that one. Third times a charm right?

The reason console games are better is because they at least worked while repeating over and over

Same result. It doesn't work and it apparently misses the disc. So I presume the files I've have aren't sufficient. So I search the web again and find iso-files for the four discs and download them. And what do you know, I finally got the first disc working. Finally, it worked. Spending more time on getting this game to work than playing the game from start to finish. A little setback happened while playing through the first part of the game as it wanted to change disc. Lucky I saved before and tried the only thing I could think about, loading all the iso's for the disc and loaded the game again. Worked perfectly. Might switch the disc's out for the dvd version so I just need to juggle one disc instead of four. Sadly I realised the limitation of Wine. The game was jumpy, moving or people moving in front of me caused hacks or whatever you called. Lucky the nostalgia warmth in my heart made me overlook those flaws since it was so fun to watch it, hear it and play it again. Another thing wrong was that at times the audio scratched or whatever and once a movie froze the whole game. But I played it from start to finish.

Barely that is

The actual game will be talked about tomorrow.