Do I have a hope? FF8 and Tutankhamun's PC

[Laivasse]

First of all, thanks and big credit to you guys for banding together and making this community in the first place - many's the time I've wished there was a place like this for other old games that I've had problems with, where fans would be around to share and pass down knowledge that might otherwise have faded from the Net.

But on to my questions. I have a very valuable fossil:
AMD-K6 366mhz
128Mb RAM

....with windows 98 and an nVidia Riva TNT2 M64. I installed FF8 the other day and after the usual myriad problems, I finally got it running to a highly unsatisfactory level. I can just about cope with the in-game slowness, but the world map runs like a sick dog, pretty much unplayable - having read all the old threads here I now understand that this is a very common problem.

However, I was able to run FF7 with the special nvidia patch almost without a hitch (nothing like this level of slowness), AND I also have an on-board ATI Rage Pro AGP which may or may not have been around in Jesus' time, but more importantly which ran FF7 way better than my TNT ever did (very smooth indeed, for this comp). In fact at the moment I have the TNT ripped out of my comp - using the Rage Pro and am in the middle of downloading the 1.02 non-GeForce patch (since both cards fail the 8-bit paletted textures).

My questions are as follows:
1) Do I even have a hope of running the world map of FF8 with my spec system? Switching off the doodahs in the config make little to no difference. And besides, I want it to look nice, like FF7 did.

2) I'm assuming things will improve (for both of my cards) once the patch is downloaded - but which card will run it better? This might sound lazy of me to ask when I could just check for myself, but for various reasons it really is a big deal to switch around my vid cards.

3) If it is the case that the TNT would run it better, which drivers should I use? browsing back through this forum it seemed that some people held onto their old detonators for years because the new ones supposedly didn't help at all with FF8.

Thanks very much - long live forums like this one!

[Aaron]

My first experience with FF8 was on a 400 MHz Pentium II laptop with 128 MB of RAM and Windows 98.  3D accelleration was not available, but the game ran at a satisfactory speed in software rendering quarter screen.

I have since attempted to run the game on a 266 MHz Pentium II with an ATI "XPert 2000 Pro" and nVidia TNT2 (in Windows XP with 256 MB of RAM).  The game didn't run that great (unless in quarter screen, then it was fine but small ), but FF7 ran fine with both cards in that system.

I would think that your 100 MHz advantage should make it a bit better, though.  What drivers are you using on the TNT2?  If they're really really old, maybe you should try the newest ones on nVidia's site just to see what happens (no problems in FF8 with the newest ones here, but I'm using a GeForce4 Ti now).  The newest drivers fix the problems with motion-blur (i.e., in the Eden summon) in FF8 on nVidia cards, but I never had that problem when I was using a TNT2 (although motion-blur was dead slow).

I had my TNT2 in a 950 MHz system for a while and FF8 ran wonderfully, but the world map always seemed to be a little sluggish.

I think the TNT2 may be a better choice, because in my experience, ATI Rage Pros are pretty crappy by comparison.  However, I don't have much experience there since those are both pretty old cards and I wasn't messing with the guts of my computer much back when they were mainstream.  You could always grab something like 3DMark2000 and see which one comes out faster if you want just a general idea.  Or maybe you could buy like a cheap GeForce2.

I guess my suggestion is try some newer drivers on your TNT2 and see what happens.

[Laivasse]

Cheers for the swift response. I'm using the 56.64 drivers - I remember downloading the very newest ones but I went back to these and can't remember why. I suppose I must have had my reasons, but I'll upgrade to the newest ones if there really is no problem.

The patch had zero effect on performance with my ATI Rage Pro, which shocked me a little. As you say it's a crappy card, and it defies logic but it really used to sail through FF7 compared to how my TNT2 used to struggle.

Anyway, as a result I dove in and plugged my TNT2 back in to see what effect the patch had with that, and it is much improved. It still takes forever to get anywhere on the map (and something sickly is up with the menu colours) but at least I could envisage myself getting through the game at this speed. Still a bit gutted that it didn't turn out to run a bit faster - maybe the newest detonators with make that last bit of difference.

One more question - I heard mention of a prog/patch(?) called Rivatuner. Since I'm trying to squeeze the last drop of blood out of this stone of a comp, do you think this prog would help me at all, and if so whereabouts could I get it?

thx again

[Aaron]

There's a link to it in the FF7 FAQ thread, but pretty much the only thing I've seen it used for around here is to fix problems with running FF7 on newer graphics cards (nothing about FF8... sorry ).

[Threesixty]

FF8PC will work fine on today's computers, with a little help from Rivatuner and the Geforce patch for FF8PC. (I said some stuff about in that FF7FAQ, if you scan down far enough.)

Go to the FF7FAQ, and do the part about modifying the config file of Rivatuner.  http://forums.qhimm.com/viewtopic.php?t=2670

[ForceWareFSAAModes]
FSAAMode01=2 x 1
Required01=170h,18Fh,200h,
FSAAMode02=1 x 2
Required02=170h,18Fh,200h,
FSAAMode05=2 x 2
FSAAMode06=ff06
FSAAMode0C=ff0c
FSAAMode0D=ff0d
FSAAMode0E=2x
FSAAMode0F=Quincunx
Required0F=170h,18Fh,200h,
FSAAMode10=4x
FSAAMode12=4x 9-tap
Required12=170h,18Fh,200h,
FSAAMode13=4xS
Required13=170h,18Fh,200h,
FSAAMode17=6x
Required17=200h,
FSAAMode19=8x
Required19=200h,
FSAAMode1A=16x
Required1A=308h,30Fh,338h,33Fh


Once you do that, go inside Rivatuner to the part where you change Anti-alaising setting and select one of the pulldowns that start with ff...try all of them, one of them should work.

The backgrounds pretty much will be without glitches. They may be black block here and there, but for the most part it will be playable and satisfying to look at.

As for running FF8 on that old computer....FF8 was always a bear to run....the World Map is the slowest part of that game....I guess it's not optimized to run on anything, Blame it on the porters.

[qwerty]

It's not completely hopeless. A simple solution is to make the game quarter screen, update the drivers, and turn off as many features as you can. A tool that can help you do this is the ff8 config made by a couple of users on these forums. Then, make sure that when you're on the world map, you zoom out!  And finally, make sure it's in DirectX and not software mode. Software mode will make the framerate hit 3 when you use a Rage card. You simply do not have enough memory with a Rage card for DirectX, so I would suggest slapping that TNT back on.

This worked on one of my old PCs when I first got FF8. The only problem is that during heavy battles, the video lags behind the sound a bit and skips a few frames. It's very playable though!

[Borman]

I remember running FF7 and 8 on "high" settings with a Celeron 333 and a tNt2 card way back when.

[fa_pa]

i played ff8 on a pII 300 with a matrox card i think a g200 settings High!