HELP!!!
Firstly, greetings to all! I'm new here as a user, but I've read a lot of the pages in my own personal quest for FF7 D3D glory!
To keep things straight-forward and to make it easy to understand my problem, I will lay out the situation in as organized a way as possible:
RELEVANT SPECS
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- Win2k
- GeForce 6600 GT (ForceWare 93.71)
- AC97 onboard sound
PROBLEM SYMPTOMS
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With 1.02 patch + High Res patch:
- Crash at end of first battle when the game should transition to the menu screen
- I have also gotten the game to crash by entering the menu screen prior to the first battle
- Graphics are beautiful and immaculate
With original ff7.exe and Software Rendering:
- Game will transition to menu screen after first battle without crashing...Slow as per the norm with software rendering
With original ff7.exe and D3D in Win98 compatibility mode:
- Game doesn't crash in this area, but the colors are garbled and the background is black
HOW I GOT THESE RESULTS
=============================
For 1.02patch results:
1) Experiment w different Nvidia video drivers
2) Erase my video codecs and reinstall as per miracle.flame's guide
3) Apply 1.02patch
4) Apply High Res patch
5) Enable Hardware Acceleration via Nvidia/TNT configuration setting
6) Experiment w different settings using RivaTuner
7) Experiment w different compatibility settings (or none)
Experiment w different levels of vid hardware acceleration
9) Experiment w different levels of audio hardware acceleration
Notes:
- Different drivers didn't make a difference
- Hacking my registry instead of using the config file didn't make a difference
- RivaTuner didn't make a difference
- I wonder if RivaTuner works for my vid card (ie if it is *able* to turn off my 8-bit paletted textures)
- the 1.02 patch didn't work in any other compatibility mode than NT4.0 (which didn't help)
For original ff7.exe results:
1) Everything above except 3), 4), and 5)
2) Results obtained for original ff7.exe with D3D came from hacking my registry instead of using the config
3) I got D3D to work using Win98 compatibility mode, but with the aforementioned graphic problems
THEORIES AT THIS POINT
======================
1) I have seen a couple people mention the possibility of the sound in the game causing it to crash. In fact I vaguly remember one user amongst us who had discovered a bug in the code specifically related to music and after-battle transitions but I didn't see any record of them posting their fix for it.
2) Perhaps the game is crashing with the 1.02patch because (perhaps) my vid card supports 8-bit paletted textures but (perhaps) I lack the ability to turn them off even with RivaTuner
I've tried a lot of things by this point and I've read a lot of the articles that have been written about the various problems getting FF7 to work.
If any of the more experienced users have any advice or leads or suggestions that I haven't already tried, I would be greatly appreciative. I've seen such beautiful screenshots from people playing this epic game on newer vid cards with all the new patches, it would be a shame to have to play the game in software rendering mode.
PS Pursuant to vague bits of information I saw suggesting that the FF7 music may be the problem, I have started looking into the newest (v1.51) FF7Music patch. No results yet however.
Thanks again to anyone who can offer help!!!
