Newbie to the board, not to the game.

[Engmus]

So here we go, im new to the board, and im probably going to ask those retard noob questions that every noob asks.  Well ahead of time im sorry, I did read through the forum, but theres so much knowledge here I dont know where to go.  I have the same problem as everyone else, boxes appearing on my screen, instabilty and the problem of XP not being able to handle FF7.  

So can I get a list of suggestions from people on patchs, tweaks, hex mods, anything that can help me run FF7 on my pc?  The animevamp patch doesnt work too good, and if you dont know about it I could link you there, on the animevamp forum the guy who wrote the patch cant work around some of the problems and is looking for some people that can code, if your interested let me know and I'll send you the link to the website\forum for animevamp. Thanks for your time.

[Aaron]

FF7 has always worked for me in Windows XP.

Download the 1.02 Riva/TNT patch (included on the Platinum edition CD), then our Chocobo Bug fix, and if you have ugly font in game and are using an nVidia card you'll want to find RivaTuner and disable 8-bit Palleted Textures.

[Lieron]

kiind of same problem with me, my game keeps freezing or crashing at certain parts (mostly when they go into a fmv)

although this should fis the chocobo problem.. (the patch never worked on my comp)

First off, copy ff7.exe to ff7.bak or whatever.
Now, I'm using an unpatched FF7 executable plucked from the Eidos Platinum Collection version of FF7.  The file size is 5820416, crc32 is E79D5195, and md5 sum is e1a6875b37540d616d34f14102d9c2fc.  If you have the same executable that I do, the change you need to make is at offset 3641e6, otherwise, you'll have to search for the right bytes to change.  So, now, open up ff7.exe in your favorite hex editor, and find the bytes

Code: [Select]

b8 86 01 00.  Again, if you have the same version of the executable that I do, you will find these bytes at 0x3641e6 from the beginning of the file.  Change them to

Code: [Select]

00 00 50 00.  That is sufficient to get the chocobo races working on my machine.  (Note that there may be other difficulties associated with running FF7 under Windows NT/2K/XP, though many of those are solved by the Application Compatibility Toolkit from Microsoft.)

[Engmus]

Has anyone tried a dual boot system?  WIN XP and 98se? If so was it successful? Im thinking about doing that, if it works.

[Aaron]

It's very, very, very easy.

The catch:  You need to install Win98 first, then WinXP.  You should set up two different hard drive partitions, C: and D:, install Win98 on C: and WinXP on D:.  (This is not completely necessary, but Microsoft recommends it.)  When you install WinXP, a boot menu will automatically be generated and when you power the computer on, it will ask you which OS you want to boot.

I can provide more details if you want.

[Lord Kane]

Personaly, if there is anything that needs to be run in 98, IO generally don't need 3d accelleration, so I just use Connectix Virtual PC

[Aaron]

Same here.  But FF7 is better with D3D accelleration, which Virtual PC does not provide.

[Lord Kane]

So you play most of the game in XP, and when you get probs, you use VPC (or ePSXe ) to pass that bit.

[Cyberman]

Another option is too use Bochs.  If one could make a virtualized D3D interface driver on it, that would work nicely.  I believe Bochs emulates the PC and uses everything (IE the processor runs 'real time').  The major draw back being of course it's a virtualized PC.  It will be slow of course but it will run ANYTHING in a window

Cyb

[dgp9999]

I tried making my system a dual booter. I used System Commander 2000. It didn't have WinXP support =( However, it did support W2k. Instructions on the software told me to install W2k first. <whine>It wouldn't have worked anyway coz of stupid computer problems...</whine>

-Dan