So much for my success story on the other page. This time I really do need help and in a rather big way.
A minor question before we get to the big one for the FF7 gurus. Is there any way of getting the black off the bottom of the screen?
http://i63.photobucket.com/albums/h124/psychicdreams/ff72007-04-1216-41-45-53.jpghttp://i63.photobucket.com/albums/h124/psychicdreams/ff72007-04-1216-37-16-29.jpgFraps shows only the bottom of the screen as black, but my monitor shows black on all four sides, just more on the bottom. I thought about moving my desktop size down to 640x480 to see if it would fix it, but apparently 640x480 no longer exists with newer computers, since the lowest I could go was 800x600 (which didn't fix it a single whit anyway.) I also have Saint's high-res patch in there, in case that might be pertinent information.
Now onto the BIGGER problem. I can't really play this game right.
You see, I just updated my processor to a dual-core (AMD Athlon 64 3800+ X2), which ended up forcing me to reinstall my windows. This time I put in SP2 as well for my XP Professional. I'd made a LOVELY backup of my games with Acronis and was just going to put it right back thank you just as it was, except somehow the backup got corrupted and I had to reinstall the game with all my patches and mods. Not fun, but I could live with it.
This time around, I'm having quite a bit of problems I'd never had before. I had gridlines, which I fixed, with antialiasing and all and it looks beautiful. I have ff7music and it sounds great to go along with the pretty graphics. However, I keep crashing. This isn't really RANDOM so much as...
I get one fade to black successful and the next time, it WILL crash. The screen will go away and not come back and I have to hard restart to get anywhere. I only get that one successful fade to black after I first start up the game. If I quit and start it back up again, it'll just fade to where its trying to load the save game and crash. It especially does this after random battles. Can't complete one. It's unplayable. I tried compatibility mode with 98 and 95, still the same.
I have a NVIDIA Geforce 7600 GS video card, with 93.71 drivers. I did have the 91.7-something before for a long time with no problems. I only recently updated my video drivers so I could play Bethesda Software's Oblivion. It probably didn't need it, but with this fresh install of windows, I figured, what the hey?
Can anyone help?
EDIT: Oh dear...I found the problem and now I feel so stupid. I'm going to feel comfortable blaming my brain for going idiotic because I'd been installing a lot of programs and games yesterday and today...At least that's my story and I'm sticking with it :p
For those who might want to know/have this problem: when you install the game, make sure the required directshow and directx 5 it wants in there are installed. Even if you think that since directx 9 should be more than enough, put it in anyway.
I ended up uninstalling and putting in each patch one by one and checking each and every time I put in something new just to be sure and it ran as smooth as glass. Even fixed the black on all sides that appeared with Saint's patch by touching up the monitor size with no ill-effects for overall. I'll just slink away in shame for my most idiotic mistake now...