Myst IV does not start on Mac OS X (Permission denied)

If you are a bit slow trying out new games, or is rediscovering the Myst series, you might get this problem when installing on a Mac.

Problem: You've installed Myst IV Revelation on your Mac but nothing happens when you click the application.

Symptoms:

If you start 'Console' and check your last messages, you'll see something similar to:

..... posix_spawnp("/Applications/Ubisoft/MystIV/myst4.app/myst4", ...): Permission denied

Solution:

The problem is that the executable application does not have the 'execution' permission set within the app.

Open 'Terminal' and go to the directory where you installed Myst IV.

$ cd /Applications/Ubisoft/MystIV/ (in my case)

Here you'll see that the Mac app is really a directory you can enter:

$ ls -l

total 8

drwxr-xr-x 4 xxxx admin 136 Aug 18 16:42 _uninst

-rw-r--r-- 1 xxxx admin 550 Aug 18 16:15 log.txt

drwxr-xr-x 9 xxxx admin 306 Aug 18 17:26 myst4.app

drwxr-xr-x 5 xxxx admin 170 Aug 18 17:29 save

drwxr-xr-x 4 xxxx admin 136 Aug 18 16:15 support

Go down into the directory myst4.app:

$ cd myst4.app

$ ls -l

total 21744

drwxr-xr-x 6 xxxx admin 204 Aug 18 16:15 Contents

-rw-r--r-- 1 xxxx admin 289 Aug 18 16:15 ares_config.xml

drwxr-xr-x 14 xxxx admin 476 Aug 18 16:42 data

-rw-r--r-- 1 xxxx admin 238 Aug 18 17:26 detect_config.dsc

-rw-r--r-- 1 xxxx admin 257636 Aug 18 16:15 libBinkMachO.dylib

-rw-r--r-- 1 xxxx admin 10866160 Aug 18 16:15 myst4

The real application is 'myst4' which does not have the executable bit set.

Fix this with:

$ chmod +x myst4

$ ls -l myst4

-rwxr-xr-x 1 xxxx admin 10866160 Aug 18 16:15 myst4

Now, start your Myst IV :)