FF7 & W2k

[cc]

I've been trying to get FF7 work in Win2k, but it crashes every time I try to go to the menu screen or a few seconds into the first battle. Actually, it took a bit of work to even get to this point; When I ran the game first time after installing it, there was no video when the game tried to play fmv sequences, only audio. Then when I installed the version of the truemotion codec that comes on the FF7 installation CD, the game started to skip the fmv sequences completely. When I started a new game, the screen was blank but the game actually started working if I went to the menu screen and then back. After I installed a newer version of the truemotion codec the game now shows at lest the eidos+squaresoft logo fmvs and the intro properly, but now it crashes when I try to enter the menu screen / battle. I've applied the chocobo patch (hoping that the two problems would bear some relation to each other :), but it didn't help. Also, the game refuses to start at all in Win95/98 compatibility mode. I tried searching for "win2k" here and found this faq (http://forums.qhimm.com/viewtopic.php?t=1662&highlight=win2k) but as someone already has said in a reply to that post, the older version of the ACT is no longer available. I tried the v2.3 ACT anyway, and it has the mentioned "VirtualRegistry" fix but I can't find the other one ("CheckWriteFileBuffer") anywhere. Does anyone know an equivalent fix that is included in the more recent ACT version? Any other suggestions (short of "use Win9x" - that OS sucks :)? Thanks in advance.

[Aaron]

Sounds like one of those wierd bugs that we don't have much luck fixing.  Sometimes the game works fine in Windows 2000/XP, and sometimes it's a huge pain.

Have you tried the game in Software Rendering mode?  How about with the 1.02 patch?
And could you give us some system specs (vid card, CPU, etc)?

And you could consider dual-booting Windows 98 with 2000 (not very difficult) to run FF7 from W98... might not be the ideal solution, but I bet it would work


Post 1300!

[Goku7]

Post 1300!

Look at it this way: Only 37 more 'till you've made your L337 Post!!

[cc]

Yes, it does this in both hw accelerated and software modes. I have to use the 1.02 patch to be able to use hw acceleration at all (otherwise the setup program whines about missing support for paletted textures), but I made a backup copy of the 1.00 exe - and it crashes too :(

System specs:
 - Processor: Athlon XP 2200+
 - Motherboard: VIA (ouch) KT333 based (ASUS A7V333)
 - Video card: Radeon 8500 based (128 MB version, manufactured by Hercules)
 - 256 megabytes of memory
 - OS: Windows 2000 Professional SP3

Btw, the faq I mentioned earlier said that the battle problem could be fixed by using the ACT to enable those two fixes, so I think I could get the game working if someone knows what that fix is called in this newer revision of the ACT :) - or did they remove it? :(

Edit: yeah, I know the faq says SP2 - and that if you have SP3 you should downgrade. However, I thought this has something to do with having to use the older version of the MS ACT (which would prolly be designed to work only with SP level 2 and not 3?) and thus didn't bother to downgrade.

[cc]

IT WORKS! YEAH!

Got it working by using the ACT settings from this page: http://www.joikkeli.org/janne/ff7.html (works fine with the 1.02 patch too, contrary to what the page claims, but thanks to the author anyway)

Only problem remaining is that music doesn't start immediately after a fmv sequence ends for some reason. First time you hear music in the game is after the first battle ends, then it starts playing the normal bgm for that area. I was planning to use fice's FF7 music hack + PSF music rips if I ever got the game up & running properly anyway, so I hope that will solve this problem too.

[Nori]

Neat but is it stable? What about Chocobo Race (etc.)?

[cc]

I guess it is pretty stable, I just played it for a couple of hours and it didn't crash even once. Don't know about the chocobo race or other minigames yet, since I don't have my old saves anywhere and had to start from scratch.

[Sephiroth 3D]

I just patched my similarly. No music, no nothing... Starting a new game, My screen is blank, save for some dailog, until the first battle. It also skips the opening movie completely... It seems to skip them all for me...  :weep:

But at least I can play the game... I'm just going to miss all the movies...

[cc]

It worked like that for me (no video except for dialogue boxes until I go to menu and back) until I installed this patch:

08.05.2001  16:46              778,968 FF7BP1.EXE

It apparently contains a more recent (or at least different) version of the truemotion codecs than those included on the FF7 installation cd. Too bad that I don't recall the official name of that patch (google search for ff7bp1.exe finds nothing), ff7bp1 probably isn't it, since I found that file from a very old "collection" cd of mine, back when I still used to burn only using iso 9660 level 1 filenames to assure 101% compatibility with dos

Then, after I got the fmv sequences working, it started to crash every time I tried to enter the menu / a battle, and MS ACT sorted that out. Seems pretty stable now, I hope minigames will work too when I get to that point in the game.

Edit: that probably is ff7betap1.exe - the official patch that is meant for fixing the upside-down fmv problem on some systems. Conveniently, it seems to also fix this problem (at least did it for me)

Edit II: shit, looks like it was too early to celebrate. Today, I got to the escape from Midgar part, and the game throws up blue screens all the time in the motorcycle minigame and (after I got through that with a bit of luck) on the world map. What is strange is that these crashes do not seem to be completely random but instead depend on what is being rendered, since the motorcycle game crashed each time when I reached the EXACT SAME POINT on the road, and I suspect that when it didn't crash, I simply were on the other side of the road than when it crashed (thus affecting what is rendered). Also, I can make the game crash with 99.999% success rate by going to Kalm in the world map, and then rotating the view back&forth using pgdn/pgup, however, at certain other points on the map I can mess with the camera as much I like and it doesn't crash. Also, it seemed to be quite stable when using the overhead view (still occassionally crashing). Software mode throws up a BSOD each time a 2d background tries to scroll around - I guess I didn't notice it earlier (ie. when trying to solve the blank screen / battle crash problem) because the first screen doesn't scroll (IIRC).

Any suggestions, or should I give up and get the psx version CD images from someone? (I consider myself to have the 'right' to warez it, since I've bought the PC version) I'd very much like to retain the high-res menus/fonts and perspective correction, though

[ye-roon]

well i just tried this and it work perfectly with me..

and i use win2k SP2 wich pwns

just to let u know

Edit:
Only that create a fix thingie doesn't work.... i can only run it from the QfixxApp program :/

Edit2:
I made a fix without checking all the boxes and that worked

[ye-roon]

bah i wanna play again, and tried it with both bozes checked and unchecked, but it only works when i run it trough qfixxap, prolly cause i have SP4 and can't install the update cause of SP4

i guess i have to use qfixx when i wanna play :/

[kyraz]

hum, what i get from QFixApp thing.. is that it patches your executable, is it so?

well... I have Win2k SP4 and somehow it doesn't wanna work, i guess mainly because i'm using ACT3.0 ... but that's the only one that works (or at least, that get's installed). Can anyone that has patched his exe can upload it? or, somehow, make it available for download?

tnx