I received a bunch of positive feedback about documenting repairing my DeLorean’s shorted electrical compartment, particularly quite a few people who were curious about what kind of work it takes to maintain a DeLorean. So I’m gonna try posting details of all my constant fix-it jobs/upgrades on here. Let’s see how this goes!
My DeLorean on display at an event inside Brisbane City Hall
The whole reason I was fiddling in the electrical compartment in the first place was to work out why my cooling fans weren’t turning on. Once the car was running again, I vowed to make sure I would never have that problem any more. In its original condition the car had an indicator light on the dash that lit up when the cooling fans weren’t working, however the way this circuit worked was SO fraught with problems that the circuit itself tended to die way more frequently than the fans did, and when the circuit died it also caused the fans to fail. The standard workaround for the last 30-something years was to just jumper past the fan fail circuit. Yes this was something people were bypassing even when the car was brand new, it was so problematic. When I went through my electrical compartment I noticed my (new when I bought the car, I might add) bypass wire had turned brown from excess heat and needed replacing, so I decided it was time to fix this in a way that not only gave me more reliability with my cooling fans but re-enabled my cooling fan fail warning light again.
My DeLorean’s cooling fan jumper bypass wire – browned from overheating, it needs replacing anyway
There’s a few options here – the main ones are to either replace it with another new jumper wire and forget about the light, or go back to the original configuration that’s fraught with troubles. Thankfully one of the people in the DeLorean community, Dave McKeen aka Bitsyncmaster, offers a much better solution. He’s put together a dual-pcb solid-state replacement with fuses on top. This replacement gives dual wiring with individual fuses per fan, which will to try and keep at least one fan operating if the other fails. And if one (or both) fans fail, the cooling fan fail light on the dash doesn’t just turn on – it flashes, which grabs your attention pretty well. What’s more, it also offers current sensing capabilities so if the current between the two fans falls outside a certain tolerance (user-configurable but by default it’s 20%), indicating that one of your fans either has a still-there-but-poor connection or is close to dying, the cooling fan light will flash too. The flashing pattern is different depending on the error code so by just looking at the warning light’s pattern, you can quickly tell that not only is something wrong with your cooling fans, but which one has the fault, and in what way it’s failed. And for some icing on the cake, the whole component is encased in watertight, airtight resin so it won’t corrode in the electronics compartment. Pretty swanky! I opted for the version with physical fuses instead of the one with resettable electronic fuses because, while I don’t doubt his engineering skills, the physical fuse version has a lot more use by other DeLorean owners.
The new upgraded fused fan fail relay. Apologies for the dirty hand; I still had liquid electrical tape on me from repairing wires!
I installed it then tested different failure modes by removing the fuses to simulate failed fans. The warning light blinked in the right pattern, indicating the circuit worked perfectly. Huzzah! š
Now for the next area in the cooling fan circuit that I thought could do with some love – the main enabling relay! This is just a standard automotive relay that is used to turn the fans on or off, but it can still be improved. The cooling fans turn on under two circumstances – the first is when the coolant temperature reaches a certain point – and as you can imagine, this can result in a little bit of fan cycling when things are right at the cutoff limit for the thermal switch. This means a large load is switched on and off repeatedly, which causes lots of spikes & sags in the car’s electrical system. The second time it turns on is when you turn on the air-conditioning of the car – at which point the air-conditioner’s compressor kicks on (another sudden huge momentary electrical load & corresponding spike), the engine’s RPM momentarily drops from the extra resistance of the compressor which means the alternator temporarily sags in its output, and the cooling fans both turn on (another huge sag of voltage plus enabling some of the largest constant loads in the whole car).
DM-eng offers a replacement smart Solid State Fan Relay as a drop-in replacement in the relay socket. Basically this is a solid state relay (which means is uses less power and can be more reliable), that delays turning on the fans by one second after the enabling signal is received (to allow the air conditioning compressor clutch’s sag and the engine’s RPM drop to settle itself), and then also guarantees the fans will run for a minimum of 20 seconds (to help eliminate constant on/off cycling). Again it’s encased in watertight, airtight resin for longevity and you can see an example of its construction on his website.
Super boring looking, but a super useful upgrade
Fitting this upgrade was as simple as doing a relay swap. Its operation was tested with an oscilloscope, both to check the delay function and its impact on the car’s electrical systems. The delaying actions worked exactly as they should, and there was a marked improvement in voltage smoothness when the AC was enabled or disabled thanks to its staggered approach. I’ll call this one a win! š
You can buy both of these relay upgrades by getting in contact with Dave McKeen, also known as BitSyncMaster, via his website.
Now that my cooling fans seem to be working perfectly, it’s time for me to move on to other electrical areas…
I live in a house that has the occasional indoor dampness & mould problem after heavy rain, so years ago I purchased a sizeable dehumidifier. The way it works is similar to a standard air-conditioner except the hot and cold sides are right next to each other, to make it far more efficient and much better at condensing moisture out of the air than just running the air conditioner.
Thereās one downside to my dehumidifier though – its dust filter is best described as a hair filter, because itās just a grid of plastic that will do nothing to purify the air that passes through it. So I thought I could improve this by turning it into a proper air filter too. Itās also a bit noisier than Iād like, so finding a way to quieten it a little would be amazing.
Whatās more, right now in 2016 if youāve ever looked up the prices of dedicated air filters to remove dust/pollen/allergens/smoke/smells, theyāre super expensive for what they are. Box fans are cheap, filter material is cheap, but somehow if you add the two together into a dedicated appliance you end up spending nearly a thousand dollars to get an acceptable-micron-filtration one at 2016 prices. Thatās just bonkers to me! I really thought there would be cheap Chinese knockoffs to filter the poor air in China, but I couldnāt find any that had the specs to actually work properly, only dodgy ones that wouldnāt filter everything. So, itās time to get hacking!
The dehumidifier in question, along with some supplies Iāll be using
In my research of filtration materials, I found that the cheapest source of stuff (including shipping) in 2016 that will go down to a fine enough micron is the filter refill packs sold for furnaces in America. Comparing the market with tech specs galore, the final material I decided upon was 3Mās Filtrete MPR1200 1. This isnāt the highest level particulate filter around but itās efficiency in the 0.3-1.0 micron range is 85% (meaning most bacteria will be caught let alone smoke etc), its pressure drop at the standard weave packing is only 0.24 (meaning it wonāt overwork the motor on my dehumidifier), it has a metal mesh built in so it will retain its shape without sagging when left vertical, and most importantly it has the highest activated carbon content of any filter on the market (meaning it will remove smells that are entirely gaseous in their nature). And check out that price for a 4-pack of big sheets of the stuff – itās also pretty darned cheap for what it is, and a 4-pack will do me for many years with regular changes.
Inside the dehumidifier showing the compressor at the bottom and the evaporator (cold side) mounted right in front of the condenser (hot side), with the filter material on the left. Mmm, carbon goodness.
Swapping the filter material was as easy as removing the old plastic grill āfilterā, cutting the filter material to size, and affixing it in place. For temporary testing Iām using some silver ducting tape I had left over, because I prefer its sticky properties over normal duct tape but also because it looks slightly less hacky than the usual grey stuff everyone uses. If youāre using the same filter material I am, pay attention to the mounting direction for airflow – the air needs to be filtered via the white side first, then hit the black carbon-filled side second! The filter material I used was also compressed a little more than it came so it had more pleats, to reduce the pressure drop even more.
All applied to its back side, with plenty of leftover filter material to spare
Now for the next step – quietening the machine!
The view from inside before any soundproofing material was applied
Testing with my ears confirmed that this unit is slightly quieter with the case off than on, which sounds a little weird and unexpected, if youāll pardon the pun. Testing with my hand showed quite clearly the cause of a lot of the deviceās noise was the large back plastic case picking up vibrations from the compressor and reverberating like a sub-woofer. The easiest way to fix vibrations transmitted like this is to add some mass to the panels, preferably slightly decoupled from the final plastic layer. But why not go all out with some sound absorbing foam too! I had some leftover butyl/foam sound deadening material 2 from another project, so I applied it to the interior of the case.
Iām (not) picking up good vibrations, itās (not) giving me the excitations
With that all done, it was time to put the screws back in, test it andā¦ holy heck itās now much quieter! Still audible, but nowhere near as annoying. I tested the filterās effectiveness by lighting some incense in a small sealed room, stinking the whole room up, then turning on the dehumidifier. The incense smell was undetectable after fifteen minutes, so I know that works well too!
Finished machine from the front – undetectable from stock
I now have a many-hundreds-of-dollars-equivalent air filter as well as a dehumidifier. Woot!
Finished machine from the rear – a little hacky looking, but function over form, amirite?
That’s right, the Riven Journals are back online! You can read more about them below or dive right in. I recommend beginning with either the middle Journal or the rightmost Journal, and leave the leftmost Journal for last – you need to solve the other four before you’ll know how to solve the leftmost one, which was actually the fifth & final Journal released. If you get stuck, here’s some hints, tips & solutions. Have fun!
Once upon a time, back in the early days of the web in 1996-1997, there was a website featuring a series of puzzles called the Riven Journals. They originally resided at http://journals.riven.com/. Basically, they served as a teaser and promotional material for the upcoming game Riven: The Sequel to Myst by Cyan, Inc, creators of the MYST series of video games. Fans were itching for information on a sequel to Myst, so Cyan’s then-publisher, Red Orb Entertainment, the non-edutainment gaming division of BrĆøderbund, contracted Organic Online to create both the Riven Journals and the www.riven.com website… Phew, that’s a lot of names!
Okay, now that I know some backstory, what were they exactly?
The Riven Journals were designed to provide an insight into Cyan’s next masterpiece without giving away any hints about the story or ending. None of the content in the Riven Journals will assist you in completing Riven, however they do enhance the gameplay by providing additional backstory and extra details about the game. However, officially speaking nothing in the Riven Journals is considered canon. Some of its contents have been flat-out ret-conned by later games or from emails & forum posts by the official D’ni Historian, RAWA, while some has simply never been mentioned again. But hey, it’s still some interesting stories, and of course some fun puzzles too!
Oooh, there’s Puzzles involved?
Of course there’s puzzles, this is a website for a Myst game, isn’t it? š The Riven Journals are split into 5 books that were originally released one at a time. This makes their ordering, 5-3-1-2-4, a little wonky today now that they’re all available. Each book contains some information or a short story plus a puzzle. Upon completing a puzzle you’re rewarded with what was back then an exclusive never-before-seen-at-the-time screenshot of Riven and, if you were among the first to solve a book, your name was added to that book’s Honorary Guildmembers page. The site also hosted a mailing list that announced when the new books were available. And before anyone asks, no I’m not going to resurrect the email list, because that would be just silly.
So what happened to them, why were they taken down?
Some time after Riven’s release, the Riven Journals were taken down as they were considered to be obsolete now that the actual game was out. Copies of the Riven Journals weren’t kept by Cyan, BrĆøderbund, Red Orb Entertainment, or Organic. I know because I reached out to as many people from there as I could find. Sadly the Internet Archives captured almost none of the Journals too.
But if they’re long gone, how are they here?
That’s why this section of my website is called the Riven Journals Restored – Reviving them has been an ongoing restoration effort spanning twenty years now. In the initial version I went scouring through the deepest reaches of the web in search of ALL the information I could find about the Riven Journals on any search engine, as well as the Internet Archives for earlier versions of those pages, as well as any other sites that are related to/link to that page and their history. This amounted to over 30,000 individual pages (yes you read that right). Collating this all together was the basis for the first major version of the Riven Journals Restored, released on the 22nd of September 2002. Later on I added a menu system for jumping between files, as it was regrettably necessary given the numerous gaps in the content at the time. Unfortunately, I didn’t find much at all. After all that scrounging I still had very little substance. Only the first book’s puzzle was playable, but it wasn’t exactly finish-able and the book itself had many missing images (including a lot of whole pages). The other four books were practically skeletons.
A few years later, I managed to hunt down some more of the original creators of the Riven Journals at Organic, and one of them had a complete directory dump from the servers. I was thrilled at first – until I discovered that it didn’t run on today’s servers at all! Thus, it was time to learn some digital archaeology and adapt the older code to work on modern servers. This fully-complete version of the Riven Journals Restored was released on the 29th of July 2006 during Mysterium 2006. Another large update released on the 31st of October 2017 for Riven’s 20th anniversary, which replaced the Java with JavaScript thanks to Kroz. And most recently on the 31st of October 2023, I’ve added mobile/tablet touch support, AI image upscaling & dynamic zooming.
How much like the original Riven Journals are they?
The Riven Journals were originally coded to run on Internet Explorer 2 and Netscape Navigator 3, and because I’m a wild madman I’ve done my best to maintain backwards compatibility with those old browsers wherever possible. Where some features have been deprecated I’ve added substitutes to try to stay as true to the original as possible (for instance window.status has been long-since deprecated by all browsers so there’s a substitute box below that shows the hover text). If you’re super curious, sometimes I documented my changes in the code with [RJR EDIT]. Some examples are making the background sounds play in modern browsers, changing the linking panel mouse-overs so they work in more browsers, and fixing up the way they use frames. The original Riven Journals were quite complex for the time, utilizing a combination of dynamically page delivery through SSI, SQL for databases, Perl scripts for handling the more complicated cookie-related tasks, with vintage PHP communicating with the Java-coded puzzles… That’s all been ripped out and replaced with modern HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and current-day PHP. I haven’t thoroughly tested its backward compatibility recently, but there’s a good chance that they’ll at least partly run on almost any web browser, operating system, or computer you can throw at it – potentially even Netscape Navigator 3 under IRIX on an old SGI mainframe, hot dang!
The latest version dynamically scales pages so they’re not the size of a postage stamp on modern high-resolution monitors. To go with this, AI upscaling has been performed so they don’t look like a blurry blob at 4k – by hand treating each image manually with the paramaters individually tuned one at a time with care, and definitely not some quick bulk export. Despite my best efforts, I’ll be the first to admit that the upscaled versions aren’t always better than a basic blurry bicubic resize of the originals, but I think they look better more than 95% of the time. Don’t fret, purists; there’s a button to view the originals on every page & every puzzle (though some puzzles only update to reflect the change after your next action, such as clicking on pieces). That button’s also useful for investigating situations where the upscaled versions look weird because the original images lack sufficient detail for proper extrapolation, or where the originals also look weird and the upscales are faithfully replicating that oddity, too. More info about this on the blog post about that specific Riven Journals Upgrade!
AI upscaling example (this one’s actually a reddish transparent .gif floating above the tan-coloured parchment background) – original version above, 4x upscale below
Help I’m stuck! Can you give me some hints?
Just keep trying; it’s more satisfying for you when you finally get it on your own! If you’re completely stuck though, here’s some hints.
Journal One:
(the book in the middle about beetle ink)
Hint 1: Three words. Each letter always produces the same tile in any position. Just gotta figure out what letters go where!
Hint 2: No letters are repeated.
Hint 3: The first word is
each
Hint 4: The full solution is
each flows ink
Journal Two:
(the book to the right of middle about an aquatic creature)
Hint 1: This one’s a game of careful trial-and-error to breed the correct animal. The final step involves breeding the animal with itself.
Hint 2: The first match is
the one that looks like a tadpole, with the one that looks like a stripey worm with four fins
(the book to the left of middle about a transport system to replace longer bridges)
Hint 1: As the page says, both left & right numbers must be equal, and you want seven units below fifty-five – aka 48 units.
Hint 2: The top thruster just multiplies both sides by 2/4/6/8 equally. Set it low then focus on finding the right button pattern & side thruster positions for something that’s a multiple of 48.
Hint 3: The correct left buttons, from the top, are
(the book on the far left that’s sliced in three) This time the book itself is the puzzle. In fact, it’s two puzzles! Additionally, you need to solve all the other journals first before you’ll have the answers to solve this one because each journal subtly changes when you finish it.
Hint 1: Can’t figure out where to start? Look closer at the book’s spine.
Hint 2: Got everything reconfigured? This puzzle looks & sounds familiar…
Hint 3: There’s actually two ways to figure out the answer to this puzzle. One way involves piecing together the dot additions on the first page of each journal after you solved them, which may need to be rotated or flipped.
Hint 4: The other way involves figuring out what page number you need in the charred fireplace combination book in Myst. What else have you got to go on in this book?
Hint 5: The correct fireplace pattern page is
the number of legs per animal on the book’s side, 248
(the book on the far left, after you’ve managed to open it)
Hint 1: When you think you have a correct answer, press the round button below and to the right of the grey working area that’s easy to miss to try activating the stamp mechanism.
Hint 2: Not all pieces are necessary. Some are there just to confuse you.
Hint 3: To save you from having to position things to the nearest pixel, pieces snap to their correct position when you’re close enough. To not make things too easy, the extra pieces also snap to a fake position. Just because there’s a snap doesn’t mean it’s correct.
Hint 4: Some puzzles have pieces that are very similar or even identical. If in doubt, look closely for differences between the pieces or try swapping them around.
Hint 5: Don’t know what patterns you should be making? Where have you seen some patterns before that only appeared after you solved a journal? If you’re having trouble finding them,
they’re blue.
Hint 5: The stamping/book moving mechanism moves in an interesting way as it works. Maybe that’s important?
Hint 6:
You need to mirror the pattern in the way the mechanism stamps the next page so it turns out correct when the book is laid flat again. For instance, the second/top book stamp is mirrored vertically.
No big clues for finding them, sorry š All I’ll say is that you have to solve all the Journals first as part of unlocking them. But so you’re not left out in the cold, here’s a single image from them:
Great! Drop me a line and I’ll reply when I can, if I can.
I want more Riven stuff!
Okay fine, just for you. Here’s a secret, as mentioned above – there’s an easter egg section hidden within the Riven Journals. It’s got a whole bunch of concept art from the original www.riven.com website, the Riven Journals and Riven itself, plus other shiny stuff like that. It’s hidden very well so you’ll have to look pretty hard to find it.
I want more more Riven stuff!
Geez, you’re rather demanding, aren’t you? Well alright, in honour of Riven’s 20th anniversary have some previously-unreleased-in-raw-form Riven concept art of the schoolroom Wahrk counting number game:
Still eager for more? Then check out Riven Elementary, a long-lost Shockwave game based on the Wahrk counting numbers toy in Riven that I also host. Much like the Riven Journals it’s also considered non-canon, but it’s also the only thing to ever feature mathematical operands, aka addition/subtraction/multiplication/division.
This is a “working” replica of a Myst linking book. It’s made out of a copy of the same book Cyan originally scanned as a texture reference.
Inside the book is a full desktop computer, completely self-contained without any external wires or hardware. In the above photo, the embedded screen isn’t just showing a still photo or a video: it’s running a full copy of realMyst PC edition. On board is a copy of all the Myst games. It’s fast enough it plays all of them smoothly (even End of Ages at ~30fps). You play the games by touching the touch-screen.
The book in question is Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, Volume LIV, Issue 312, December 1876 to May 1877 (roughly equivalent to an antique Reader’s Digest)… 140 years old & still in this condition. Finding the book’s exact edition is difficult – my years of research have revealed what looks like at least 14 different bindings of the same book. But there’s lots of close matches that appear on second-hand auction websites.
Unlike Cyan’s well-worn copy, this one is almost pristine. The cover has been beautifully restored & the cracked hinge has been repaired. Custom embossing dies were made for the individual MYST letters, then the embossing was filled in with 24-carat gold paint.
(Yes I essentially destroyed this book to convert it into a Myst linking book, but I like to think that it’s cooler now. At least 20% cooler.)
Inside the book is a full, hand-assembled desktop computer. The space inside is tiny, nearly half the size of a netbook, so I spent a long time sourcing the absolute smallest parts you can buy that met all of my requirements. It’s a 3-dimensional electronics version of Tetris – this is what it looks like with both the motherboard & battery removed, plus with everything installed.
Technical Specs:
The screen is a 640×480 5.0-inch LED-backlit display. This provides 1:1 native pixel mapping on the original versions of Myst, Riven & Exile. There’s a matching 4-wire resistive glass touch-screen overlaid on top as the main input method, which updates at 160 samples/second with a touch resolution of 2048×2048.
The power supply is a 3-cell Lithium-Ion battery capable of delivering 60A of current (but the book uses nowhere near that much). The power supply converts its voltage to the 12V & 5V required by the computer. Power consumption is around 12 watts & the battery life is around 1.5 to 2 hours.
The CPU is an Intel Z530P running at 1.6GHz, and the GPU is an Intel GMA500 chipset capable of running DirectX 9.0C graphics. The system has 1GB of RAM (less RAM = less power consumption & heat). The motherboard was a custom order from Broadcom’s Advanced Research division.
The system is entirely passively cooled and waste heat conducts out through the book. The CPU & GPU hover at 48°C. The only way to deal with heat in this book is to just avoid creating it in the first place, so all the components are ultra-low power.
The Operating System (Windows XP) & all software are loaded directly from a 32GB CompactFlash card that reads at 22MB/s.
Included software is Myst Masterpiece Edition, realMyst, Riven DVD edition, Riven Elementary, Myst III: Exile DVD edition, Myst IV: Revelation, Uru: Ages Beyond Myst & The Path of the Shell, Myst V: End of Ages, The Manhole Masterpiece Edition and Crowthistle. Bonuses include a copy of the Book of Atrus e-book, plus shortcut copies of some extracted Myst Island flyby videos/linking panel images. Also, when you first turn on the book a video automatically plays featuring Atrus writing at his desk, then he looks up at you & mouths the words āwho the devil are you?ā.
For those whose eyes just glossed over reading all that, consider this – it can run Half-Life 2 at a 30fps+ & it contains the best editions of all the Myst games plus some extras.
Also included are some additional props – a blank white page and a blank blue page. These were sourced from additional copies of the exact same book Cyan used as a texture reference, meaning they’re as “proper” as you can get. With the book’s red interior lining, this makes a complete set of the three page colours used in Myst. They are their original hues & have not been dyed, so the blue is slightly more turquoise & the red is slightly more brown than they appear in the game. You can’t be too picky with original 135-year-old paper hues.
What’s more, when Cyan decided to create their new high-definition 3D re-release of realMyst Masterpiece Edition, their original book texture was too low-resolution and their original prop is in very poor condition. So, they used a scan of my book for the in-game asset of the Myst book and as a basis for the red & blue linking books. Which would make this not just a fan-made replica Myst book any more, but now the actual real Myst book. You can see it in the intro video below, plus my name has been added to the opening credits.
I’m Mike Ando, a time-travelling mad scientist. DeLorean driver. Satellite owner. Inventor. Potato connoisseur. Once on Beauty & the Geek Australia, now a Professional Geek.
