All right, for lack of any other solution, I wanted to play FFVIII with hardware acceleration and antialiasing, since it's beautiful. Low and behold, thanks to my mother's obsession with computers, we have one in almost every room of the house and in her bedroom, there happens to be a Windows '98 machine (rarely used) with a GeForce TI 200-something like that. From all my research, on a card that old, FFVIII
should work.
I was about to give up when I got a wrong disc error, but since the dvd drives are so old, I took a chance as a last resort before image/daemon tools plan and just refreshed my computer when the cd was read. Hurdle 1: Crossed with minor scrapes and bruises in the War To Make Final Fantasy VIII Work.
The major problem that I'm encountering that I cannot get passed is FFVIII's heightened sensitivity to game controllers and keyboards. The controller won't work period even after I took pains to install the software and driver (made me miss XP's 'do it for you' real bad). The USB hubs in the back of the machine aren't 2.0, so...might be the problem. I thought, 'fine, so long as the keyboard works, I can get back to the controller'. Wrong. The keyboard won't even work. It's like it's perpetually STUCK on right or something. I can't load a save and I can sit there and watch Squall twitch his way on the screen. Amusing for the first three seconds. Annoying after half an hour. I tried using ff8play.exe and its configurator. No luck. The config for 8 originally won't even let me choose keyboard, it keeps going back to controller even if one isn't plugged in. Even thought it was the machine overboosting it and went to software mode. Still the same.
Tally of wins and losses:
Human wins: 1
Computer Error wins: 5726932
Help please?