100+ views with no replies... so, I decided to have some fun, because what are virtual machines good for if not testing out all sorts of creative... havoc (at one point, Cloud somehow had half a face transplant, while cowgirl Tifa sported a vertex-point waist)
Anyways, here's what's changed since my OP compared to where I am now. Maybe someone can come up with other stuff to throw at the wall. It's only a VM (hehehe)
Original: Win7 x64 inside VirtualBox v5.2.22 on Win10 Pro v1803 x64, 7H v1.54
Now: VirtualBox v6.0.2, 7thHeaven v1.55. Clean install on fresh VM (so stale registry settings wouldn't exist)
Results: Everything seems to be working except...
Media-Movies: They don't look too different from original to my old eyes, but I did find some giveaways after digging into the IRO that tell me it's not working. An easy one is that I'm seeing the original Eidos logo from:
[00000001] INFO: D:\FF7\Movies\eidoslogo.avi; truemotion2/pcm_u8 320x240, 15.000000 FPS, duration: 10.133333, frames: 152
instead of the cmh175 remastered version (the smoking gun is that cmh's version leads off with a high res "Square Enix" while the original does not)
Field Textures-satsuki: The tell here is that waterfalls look like a five year old discovered the "oil paint" filter on Photoshop, though I suppose this could be caused by bad OpenGL options?
Text/menu type graphics: These are all still very much original FF7 in style, and nothing like what the library preview images for the "Battle Textures" and "Spell Textures" mods would suggest. Perhaps I'm missing a mod, or should be running something other than ff7.exe (I have not the Beacause/MO mod)?