Broderbund Names The Successor To Its Landmark Myst

The Age

Tuesday November 26, 1996

THE long-awaited follow-up to Myst, the biggest-selling entertainment software title of all time, won't be released for months, but the first images of the new CD-ROM made their official debut at Comdex.

At the same time, Broderbund, the company distributing the CD-ROM, announced that the sequel will be called Riven.

In this the naming follows the pattern set for Myst, which is also the name of a mythical island.

Riven will be released simultaneously for Macintosh and Windows in a CD-ROM format in mid-1997, barring further unforeseen delays.

Myst, released in October 1993, was a landmark in the personal computer business and proved to be so popular that some people said it was one of the main reasons they bought a home computer.

According to Broderbund officials, more than 2.5 million copies of Myst have been sold so far.

Bus backers

BACKERs of the Universal Serial Bus (USB), an interface aimed at replacing most of the sockets on the back of today's computers, celebrated their standard's first birthday at Comdex and said USB was now ready to move from the developmental phase to real products.

The Universal Serial Bus allows as many as 127 devices to be attached to a personal computer.

It can be used for a variety of different peripherals, including printers, scanners, video cameras, and even telephones.

At 12 megabits-per-second, it offers faster data transmission than currently popular interfaces, and it is simpler to set up.

The Universal Serial Bus Implementers Forum (USB IF) announced that 200 companies were developing USB peripherals and systems.

Body electric

FORGET optical fibre, twisted pair, coaxial cable, and even infrared. IBM researchers have come up with a new data transmission medium, and it's us.

People, that is. Researchers from IBM's Almaden research facility showed reporters at Comdex devices that can send and receive data through the human body at speeds of about 2400 bits-per-second (bps).

IBM demonstrated the technology by using it to read data from an electronic card on one individual when he shook hands with another individual.

The second person was holding a receiver that picked up the text data transmitted by the card.

Tom Zimmerman, of the Almaden research centre, said the device might be used to activate an automatic banking machine.

It would be more convenient and more secure than today's magnetic stripe cards, he said, because the holder would not have to remove it from his or her pocket.

Besides the convenience, this would avoid giving away the location of the person's wallet to bystanders and eliminate the risk of leaving it behind, he said.

Net TV

MITSUBISHI previewed DiamondWeb TV, a World Wide Web-enabled "PC TV," due to ship in mid-1997, that will display a Web browser plus traditional TV fare.

DiamondWeb TV will incorporate a television set from Mitsubishi already on the market, a built-in modem, an external port for an optional cable modem; and ViewCall's On-TV Internet service for the home and accompanying remote control unit.

By clicking on the Internet channel, TV channel surfers will log on to a Java-based ViewCall home page which will supply special information on local news, sports, weather, and TV listings, along with access to Internet e-mail and the wider Web.

The remote control unit that comes with On-TV will indicate that e-mail has arrived by means of a blinking red light.

Disc attention

DVD (digital video disc) was one of the lead stories at the show. The device replaces standard CD-ROM drives and provides up to 25 times more storage than a CD-ROM.

The DVD technology requires an MPEG-2 (Motion Picture Experts Group) board and AC3 audio capabilities.

With those requirements in place, users can view feature films with theatre-quality sound on their PC.

Since the technology is new, software titles and applications written to take advantage of DVD are almost nil. Experts project more new titles by mid-1997.

Earlier this year, manufacturers behind the DVD revolution said the technology would be slow coming to the computer desktop and would be expensive when it arrived. The first DVD players were built as players for television.