anti-aliasing with xp and radeons/thoughts on forum

[Likewoahman]

hi first of all, id like to say ive never done as much researching about something so simple as i've done here which i almost never do, one reason being its ff7, a bigger deal to me, the main reason, im on a 28.8 connect for now which means i cant go downloading diff driver releases and stuff..

and i have a few ideas, get rid of the links thread and startover and list everything orderly like the first post is in as little space as possible then quickly lock it, i think we know most everything we can by now, but there will still be new people like me looking to learning/on the progress...

the forums are just a little unorganized for searching for info...

now i know us ff7 fans have to make do, and so the surviving hardcore fans of the pc port are either programming savvy or just fans like me who end up learning

this is exactly the opposite of what you find on the internet, people dont inform well, but are organized.... id rather have it like this though and im just saying its good to see people talking fluidly and being so informative though scattered

ALSO i read on eidos site that you can edit in regedit to add movies to your hard drive (i just put a movies folder in my ff7 folder) since we have more space these days (its like 700 megs or something, most reoccuring movies from the first cd)

i just never saw it mentioned here i dont think and its quicker and might even cut down on some of those errors, im always in fear my cd's get overused and scratched anyway, and retail cd-r's are really poor for quality
PLUS (it says in full installation all files but movies are installed) so you might not even need one, though i checked on a reinstal and theres some bootup file i think it needs at first, or probably creates)

for a while it was unclear to me what everyone meant by the 1.2 file thingy, when a newcommer like me sees this its a little unclear, because theres that riva 1.2 patch then the ff7 1.02 config

we also need to seperate things into files/instructions for not just geforce users but radeon

and also note things like w2k is now playable from what i find out and also list things in best quality/compatibility

NOW onto what i couldnt find out for sure is can any radeon users use anti aliasing by any means ? i mean somehow geforce users can, but we cant ? they have that powerstrip for nvidia users but what about ati ? surely theres something right, i've seen on cnet asia someone saying they used aa on an older radeon the 7200 with the "unofficial ff7 xp hack"

i think there was more i wanted to know but thats it for now

[Likewoahman]

oh yea good job on all of the work, i dont usually like unofficial releases but what else can you do.

oh and i remember people mentioning in some thread a ywar+ ago talking about radeons not supporting 16 bit fsaa but i think thats been included since...

what does that have to do with ff7 if it uses the 8 bit anyway remember ?

also on the chocobo patch legal thing... if jedwin hadnt of released a patch and just informed eidos im sure they would have made one, seeing his interest in it but oh well he already made it and they would fear a sue if they made it official  

all of this reading here really makes your head spin... i mean i was getting pretty impatient trying to find my way through everything  

oh and that one qhimm patch updater couldnt read any files in my ff7 directory..
instead it wrote them all to 0 kb.... this all can get pretty confusing.

[Aaron]

Didn't someone from Eidos post here about Jedwin's patch?

Greetings all.

I wear several hats at Eidos' San Francisco offices and all I can say
is 'Hats of to jedwin'.

I have tested numerous saved games sent in from some kind folks and
myself completed a playthrough (up to Gold Saucer/Chocobo race) under
XP Home after hex-editing the ffvii.exe. Another Eidos tester also got a
good playthrough on a separate XP system. Planning on doing the same
for Win 2000 but right now other tasks are pressing.

Looks like a success.

(bows in jedwins' general direction)

The legal types have told me we cannot make this an officially supported
patch or fix for several reasons, but (with jedwin's permission) I will be
making an "unofficial FAQ" detailing how to fix the problem and crediting
him with the fix.

I personally have spent quite a few hours over the past year trying to
isolate and fix this crash (however, I am a small-brained non-
programmer), and wish to say "Thanks, jedwin!!!"

Other FFVII players will be thanking you too.

Be well, and see you around the plantation.

http://forums.qhimm.com/viewtopic.php?p=20095#20095

Yeah, you can use regedit to change the path where the game looks for the movies.  So if you copy the movies to your hard drive and change the path to reflect their new location, it should work fine.  Alternatively, you can use some kind of CD-ROM emulation software to make an image of your CD and play the game from that (CloneCD or Alcohol 120% come to mind).

As far as getting FSAA to work correctly in FF7 (without messing up the backgrounds), that'll be a trick.  I would recommend against installing the unofficial FF7 patch from AnimeVamp, and here's why...

[Likewoahman]

im just clearifying what you mentioned

yea but that is such a crappy compilation of hacks i dont want it, the messing with windows/inflating game size/who knows what else

it shouldnt be supported

BUT cant someone find out what in that fixed it ? so we can independantly offer anti aliasing/with radeons ?

hasnt anyone tried this yet ?

[Aaron]

I'm assuming that you're talking about the unofficial FF7 patch.  As far as I can tell, it doesn't fix any graphics problems that the FF7 1.02 patch doesn't also fix... because all it is is the FF7 1.02 patch with the chocobo patch applied.

[Likewoahman]

hmm ok then

i guess that sums it down to drivers, whoever says they can anti alias on radeons must be using diff drivers...

that seems a little improbable... those gridlines are kind of serious depending on your alias rate
now i have to dig for the best versions of catalyst drivers if there are any that even enable fsaa...

[Greendragon]

That unofficial patch is hell... avoid it like the plague

[EmperorSteele]

OH OH!!!

Question.

If i do this (the regedit movies thing) so it reads movies off the HD, can i substitute them for other movies w/ the same name?  Because a friend of mine ripped the movies straight from the PSX discs and they're MUCH better than the crappily compressed .avis that come with teh game; I'd like to know if it looks for the exact same vidoe, or just one w/ the same name.

[Sephiroth 3D]

ES: Yes, you can do that.

Personally, I used to burn copies of the FF7 discs, just to save my originals, (I still have them too!!) but just the other day, I ripped all four discs into ISO mode, and now, using Daemon Tools, I'm mounting them as normal CDs, and not having a problem with them at all. (I also install from a mounted CD, so....)

[Likewoahman]

yea you can rename i think i remember reading, i mean just doing the regedit is a lot, like theres no instructions

you're lucky, i heard  how crappy the avi's turned out to be..
hmm i wonder how much better it looks, i never played ff7 for ps

yea i thought about mounting but i didnt have too much space at the time, i hate how easy cd's can get scratched

[Aaron]

If i do this (the regedit movies thing) so it reads movies off the HD, can i substitute them for other movies w/ the same name? Because a friend of mine ripped the movies straight from the PSX discs and they're MUCH better than the crappily compressed .avis that come with teh game; I'd like to know if it looks for the exact same vidoe, or just one w/ the same name.

That has been discussed. The AVIs that come with the PC version look way better if you play them outside of the game in Windows Media Player, part of the in-game crappiness comes from how the game handles displaying them at 16-bit I think.  People have tried re-encoding the PSX ones, but this often leads to trouble with the audio syncing with the video...