While analyzing the historical material in Uru, I ran into a problem. How could I equate the dates, given in D'ni form, with events on the surface? I knew that several timelines had been published in the past that listed dates from both the Gregorian calendar and the D'ni calendar (or Cavernian calendar, as I like to call it) for events in the games and novels. But, how was this done? No one (outside of Cyan and the DRC) seemed to have a clue, or be able to replicate the feat for documents discovered in Uru. The D'ni date conversion programs available to us then were unable to process dates that far back in D'ni history.

After exhaustive research, I managed to recreate the algorithms for performing Gregorian-Cavernian date/time conversions, and have documented my techniques in an article in the D'niPedia Archive. A copy of that article is also available for download in Adobe PDF format from the list of files below. Hopefully these procedures will never again be lost to Myst fandom.

To test the algorithms while working on the article, I ended up writing a set of Excel 2000 macro functions that implement them. I have made these available for other students of the D'ni civilization who might enjoy them, and you can download them from the list below, either as plain VBA code, or as a complete workbook that also contains an extensive timeline of D'ni history. If you're not interested in algorithms and code but simply want to see the timeline, I have provided that in PDF format.

These algorithms have now been implemented in the Cavernian Calendar Converter (aka CCConverter), a date/time converter utility written in Visual Basic 6.0. The features of the program are described on the CCConverter page, where you will also find the link for downloading it.

All of the following files are offered under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2.0. You are free to copy and modify them as described in that document.

(For those of you who have your macro security set to High (as you should!), I apologize for not being able to code-sign the macro module. The "establishment" currently makes it impossible for an individual developer of freeware or shareware to obtain the digital certificate needed for this. However, rather than lowering your macro security settings (which I do not recommend), you can review the code to ensure that it is not malicious, and then "self sign" it after generating a certificate using the selfcert.exe program installed with MS Office.)