Hello tzuk and Sbie Members!
I haven't been here in a while guys, nice to be back on the forums again!
Unfortunately though I come back with a problem report.
I am currently having a problem with this one game, and I hope you can help me. I'll try not to confuse anyone, but I need to explain everything I have tried.

Anyways, onto the problem.
I am currently trying to install this one game, Riven, into a sandbox (so as to keep the junk off my PC). In case you don't know, Riven is an old adventure game from the 90's, it is a sequel to the popular adventure game, MYST.

Now here is the problem. The version of Riven I own, is the DVD-rom version from 1997 (though the DVD-rom was released 1998 I think, and I bought it 2000) and the only supported OS's are 95 and 98, not sure if that makes any difference though.
Well anyways, for some reason, Cyan thought it would be funny to make the game installer 16-bit, while the actual game files are 32-bit. Why they did this, I do not know, I heard it has to do with the installer being backwards compatible with older OS's, but that doesn't make sense, because if you are on an older OS with only 16-bit support, how will you run the 32-bit game files?
Well anyways, apparently this 16-bit installer doesn't like Sandboxie, cause I get this message often when trying to run it sandboxed:



I have really tried everything to get it to install sandboxed, but everything I try just reproduces some sort of error.
Heres what I've done.

1. In Riven sandbox, set drive J (my DVD drive) to forced. Pop disc in and instead of firing up the games autorun.exe sandboxed, it instead fires up an instance of explorer sandboxed and it is displaying the contents of the disc.
If I then double click autorun.exe (in sandboxed explorer) it fires up correctly, but when I hit the "Install" button to launch the setup the installer appears to launch correctly as it displays the "loading" window, but then I get an error that installshield failed, and the installers "loading" window just stays stuck.
If I double click setup.exe instead, then it fires up correctly and I can get to the installer.... BUT IT IS UNSANDBOXED!
Yes, somehow Riven has the mystical ability of leaking out of the sandbox, even though Sandboxie should be forcing anything that setup.exe does or anything that runs from J:\.

2. If I set autorun and setup as forced programs in Rivens sandbox, then pop the disc in, it will correctly start up autorun sandboxed instead of just displaying an explorer window sandboxed, however if I click the "Install" button from autorun, it again launches the setup window unsandboxed!

3. I removed all forced programs and drives from Riven sandbox and decided instead to right click drive J and "Run Sandboxed", pick Riven sandbox and hit ok.
This fires up explorer sandboxed like in step 1.
I double click autorun and it starts sandboxed, but clicking "Install" fires setup up unsandboxed and double clicking setup from drive J spits out a windows error about not be able to find the file, even though the installer starts up fine... unsandboxed though...

Note steps 1-3 were performed with autorun and setup set to 95/98 compatibility mode.
If I leave them alone so they run without any compatibility settings, then the same stuff happens, except I'll also get this message:

Note that regardless of the sandboxie message, the installer did start correctly, but it was unsandboxed...

So in the end, I either cant get the installer to start correctly, or when it does start, it is somehow leaking outside of the sandbox...
Anyone got any idea what I can do or what could be wrong?
I have been using Sandboxie for years now, I have never had any problem forcing any program to install/run Sandboxed and I have yet to ever see any program break out of the sandbox, up until now.
So I am really baffled as to what the hell is happening...

Oh almost forgot, I am using Win XP Pro SP3 up-to-date and the latest Sandboxie from the download page.

Hello SnD, how are you?

I suggest you try running at least the installation inside DOSBox.

Then either recover those "normal" programs and run them directly under Sandboxie, or indirectly through DOSBox.

I know from experience that DOSBox installs and runs fine under Sandboxie, in case you still want an isolated sandbox for all of this.

Haha, I've been really busy lately, but I'm doing good tzuk, how are you?
I also wanted to comment real quickly on the newest Sandboxie build, as it seems you reorganized the "sandbox settings" window and added more options, looks nice, also Sandboxie runs great too!

Back to the problem though, I actually never even thought of trying DOSbox yesterday, right now though I am booted into my Mac and so I'll need to restart and use boot camp to switch to my XP partition, but I cant do that yet as I have some files I am working on right now, so I might give it a try later, but I dont know how well it will work, cause AFAIK the game is not a DOS game, it just stupidly comes with a 16-bit installer, while everything else is 32-bit.

However last night I got back home and eventually had some free time, so I tried messing around with Riven again and I discovered something that I hadn't noticed before. I checked Task Manager while the installer was open and it turns out it is not "setup.exe" as I originally thought, it is actually a weird process name, "_ins0432._mp".
Well I went ahead and added "_ins0432._mp" to the forced programs list in the Riven sandbox, then I popped in the CD, autorun started up (unsandboxed, which was normal as I didnt force autorun or drive J) clicked "Install", I got a quick 'unpacking' sort of window, which I assume was from setup.exe, and then the Riven installer fired up sandboxed!
I was able to step through the installer just fine, and when it eventually fired up the required Quicktime v3 (outdated, I know) installer, it too launched sandboxed, as did the DirectX v5.5 installer as well!

Only problem I encountered after that was with trying to launch Riven....
For some reason, when I used Sandboxie start menu to launch Riven, my mouse just changed to an hour glass every few seconds and it took forever for it to finally open, when it did I was met with a plain black screen and no mouse. After about 3 minutes the mouse showed up, but it was dragging soooo slowly. Once the riven menu finally came up, maybe 8 minutes later, trying to click anything on the menu took forever.
I eventually just gave up and decided to possibly try working on it later.
I think I might try exploring sandbox and changing the compatibility settings to 98 on the riven executable, maybe also disable visual themes and force 640x480 resolution, see if it helps...

However I am still curious as to why the Riven setup kept firing up unsandboxed...?
Sandboxie should've been able to force anything that autorun executes sandboxed, especially when I had the entire J drive forced.
Is it a vulnerability that exists in Sandboxie, is it because Sandboxie was having trouble finding the setup file?
Maybe it is because of the weird file extension the setup used, '_.mp'?
It does have me slightly worried as I have never personally seen anything break out until now, but atleast in this case it was just a game... but I still wish I knew how it kept happening.

Nevertheless, I'll be back later and I'll post my experience with Riven running sandboxed.
Btw, I was wondering, are there any beta versions available yet? You know me, I always like to have the latest and greatest versions.

There isn't a beta now. Can you make the 16-bit installer EXE available to me somehow? I'd like to check it out.

Hello tzuk, sorry for taking a while to respond...
Anyways, the other day I had some free time, so I switched over to my XP partition, fired up Riven using the sandboxie start menu, and this time it started up just fine! No black screen, no horrible lagging, no taking forever to start up, etc..
I didn't even have to change the compatibility settings or anything like that, so I'll just chalk up the issue I was having as one of those occasional weird XP bugs.
However, the issue of correctly forcing the setup still remained.

Anyways, I dont mind sending you the setup file(s), but the problem is that I tried copying it off the disc and to my desktop and it doesn't seem to work correctly, it fails to even launch.

I would rather create an iso of the disc and send you that instead, but it is a 3.4Gb disc, so it would take a while.

I'll try copying every folder and file from the root of the drive except for the folder(s) containing the texture files and stuff like that as those are not necessary to the setup. If I can do that then I should have only the bare minimum needed to launch the Riven setup and I'll send you that instead.

Well talk to you later.

Thanks, if you can prepare such a bare setup package that I can use to reproduce the problem, that would be useful.

Hey tzuk, I'm back.

Anyways, I went ahead and compiled a "bare bones" iso of the Riven setup disc. I trimmed out as much as I could without causing the setup to self-terminate or whatever.

Anyways, mount the iso, or burn it to a disk. Then try these steps:

1. Set the drive as a force folder. Then try launching autorun.exe and/or setup. Also try allowing the disc to autorun when you mount/pop the disc in, it is should launch autorun.exe, but results may differ.
2. Set autorun as a force process and then either execute it or "autorun" the disc.
3. Set setup as a force process and then allow autorun to open sandboxed/unsandboxed and see if it forces/runs the setup correctly.

Dont forget to try setting compatibility options and see if they make any difference or not.

Lastly, I was able to trim a 4 Gb disc down to 26Mb and have sent you the link to it in a PM!

Cya later tzuk.

Great job! I got the file, let me see what I can find out.

Thanks again for the trimmed ISO file. I tried to reproduce the problem but was unable to. I followed your instructions but everything worked as expected for me, with no program launching out of the sandbox.