Installing my old Riven on Windows 7, 64 bit machine ... and running it without swapping CDs

I could find no way to get it to install on Windows 7, 64 bit machine directly. (Plenty of websites confirm it just won't work.)

But, I have a second computer with Windows XP on it and was able, with a bunch of extra steps plus USB memory, to get Riven onto my Windows 7, 64 bit machine. Sweet.

Normal installation on XP

I did a normal install of Riven on the Windows XP machine. That's the easy part (except, sometimes, for the QuickTime part of the installation, and perhaps the steps at the end of this post regarding "Skip" help in that).

Tweaks to enable running Riven without CDs

Then I enabled that machine to run Riven without my having to swap CDs:

- I opened two Explorer windows: one showing my Program Files\Riven\data folder, and the other showing the Data folder of CD 1.

- I copied the MHK file(s) from CD 1's data folder to the computer's data folder.

- I similarly copied the MHK files from the other CDs' data folders to the one data folder on the computer.

- I opened the riven.cfg file (Program Files\Riven) in an editor. About half way down is a comment that says "Data file sets". There are groups of *spit. Each has its own "Disc =" a number line. For every one of those, I changed the number to 0. That's it for Riven. It worked fine on the XP machine without the CDs.

Transfer to the Windows 7 machine

I moved the Riven folder from the XP machine to a USB device (I didn't have a big enough memory stick, so I used... my camera's memory!) and from the USB device to Program Files\Riven on the Windows 7 machine.

Install the ancient QuickTime

I viewed CD 1 on the Windows 7 machine, drilling down into QTWSETUP\WIN32\CUSTOM.

I ran QT32INST.EXE and selected Install and Start. It fails with "QuickTime for Windows has stopped working." I selected "Close Program".

I restarted the same QT32INST.EXE program and selected Complete and Start. It, too, fails. But stuff is being or has been installed.

I restarted and selected Skip and Skip All. (Is it checking for newer versions of the QuickTime pieces? Is that what's failing?) Skipping let me get a new Install button, and I progress, obtaining the desireable "red filmstrip" style progress bar and then a message of success.

By golly, my old Riven now works on my new Windows 7, 64 bit machine.

Multi-core machine?

Riven doesn't do well with multi-core. So, each time I start Riven, I have to view Task Manager (Ctrl-Alt-Del), right click the Riven process, select Set Affinity, waaaait for the window to appear, and unchecked all but one core. Then it doesn't crash randomly.