New to Myst, but not old pc games. Somehow this one passed me by at the time. I refuse to use walkthroughs, as you usually catch a glance at other solutions while looking for yours, and that really spoils the game for me. I'm only looking for a hint here, please no spoilers.

Ok, pretty sure I've been to every area open to me right now (including a few hidden passages). Found a few places where you can mess with dials but haven't seen any clues anywhere what to set anything to. I think the first thing I'm supposed to do, after reading that note on the ground, is count the amount of (switches?) on the island and enter that into the pool thingy right next to the game starting point. Well, I did, nothing happened. I think I have to do this first before I can move on to anything else.

Can anyone point me in the right direction here? Without giving it away?

EDIT: MYST ME

Yeah, you need to count the markers scattered around the island and then insert that number into the panel in the forechamber and finally activate the viewer to catch the message mentioned on the note. If that's what you are doing chances are you're not entering the correct number on the panel.

Another possibility, assuming you're inserting the correct number, is that the message is not displaying. You can check if there's a problem with the scenes by starting a game and observing what happens. If you get the animation logo and the scene depicting the star fissure you're ok, if it jumps straight to the cover of the book you're probably not ok and you'll have to see about getting the scenes to display .