Qhimm.com Forums
Miscellaneous Forums => General Discussion => Topic started by: BloodShot on 2009-06-26 17:05:31
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I remember way back in 98, i got an issue of PC gamer in the mail, and in the demo disc was the PC demo of Final Fantasy VII. I can't find it now, but i remember the demo took you through the whole part of the game at mt. corel, from the entrance all the way past the train tracks, with changes from the real game, such as aeris or red XIII not being there.
I look online though, and i can NEVER find that demo. All i ever see is the battle arena demo.
I mean, it doesn't really matter much since i own both the pc and psx versions, but I'd like to know just what the hell happened to that demo and if anyone else remembers it?
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Oh i've got that demo, its got the psx music playing the in background too. Why didnt they keep it like that for the final? :?
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Oh i've got that demo, its got the psx music playing the in background too. Why didnt they keep it like that for the final? :?
Were the music files mp3s?
I remember hearing somewhere that the reason FF7 used synthesised music was that the makers couldn't fit the game with mp3 files on three discs. This isn't so much of a problem with the PSX version, but it means that the PC version had the awful sounding MIDIs. Presumably, Square didn't want to go to the trouble of making orchestral versions of everything and putting the game on four discs (not including the install disc), just to make the PC version sound good (@#&%ers!).
There's a significant chance that everything I've just said is a load of crap :lol:
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Oh i've got that demo, its got the psx music playing the in background too. Why didnt they keep it like that for the final? :?
Yeah i think i remember having the psx music playing, because i was playing the ps1 version at the time and comparing them, and thought the pc one looked better because of the direct 3d rendering.
Do you have that PC gamer demo disc? or did you get it from somewhere else?
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There were two demos released. I managed to find:COUGH:and download:COUGH: both maybe 2 years ago. The only significance I remember from one of them was the characters had huge eyes lol
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First person to find it with any sort of technical skill gets to reverse engineer the music code and render FF7Music outdated.
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found it. surprisingly completely legal (to my knowledge)
http://games.softpedia.com/get/Games-Demo/Final-Fantasy-Demo.shtml
only 9MB though, so i'm not sure if it's safe or not.
Just thought i'd post it. found it also on cnet.
I sadly lack all skill though, Might ask Aali to do it though (once he's finished with his other two projects i'm sure) he has a lot of skill in coding from what i gather.
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the demo is still a midi tho
This isn't the demo... that they were referring to i don't think..
Cause that is the battle square.. not the corel mountains
they were talking about.
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I heard the Corel area demo (at least the 3Dfx / Glide demo) used Wave files, not mp3s.
Edit: ONLY the 3Dfx demo it seems has the Wave music.
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strange..i had a demo of ff7 awhile back but it was a demo for the very first reactor. I remember it fairly well.
started out with a lvl 25ish team of cloud barret and i think arieth with some decently powerful spells like leviathan (i spammed this move so much)
then the demo ended with the first reactor exploding....ahhh memories
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This it?
(http://i85.photobucket.com/albums/k61/ultima_espio/scan0002.jpg)
Or this one?
(http://i85.photobucket.com/albums/k61/ultima_espio/scan0003.jpg)
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Well i found every CD for $150 on ebay haha..
I'm sure one of them is right, I'm looking for the other demo. only lead is that i's 120mb
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I heard the Corel area demo (at least the 3Dfx / Glide demo) used Wave files, not mp3s.
Edit: ONLY the 3Dfx demo it seems has the Wave music.
Wave? :-o Wow, no wonder they changed the music for the final game :wink:
First person to find it with any sort of technical skill gets to reverse engineer the music code and render FF7Music outdated.
I approve of this post. Even if it means we need over a gigabyte of space for the soundtrack, it'll be worth it.
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I'm gonna install and test them, see which one it is. I'm sure its the 2nd one lol.
However when you install it, it screws with the final....
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Well i found every CD for $150 on ebay haha..
I'm sure one of them is right, I'm looking for the other demo. only lead is that i's 120mb
Are you sure?
I seem to recall - not sure, though - that the 3Dfx demo was around 50 to 90 MBs. I've had it. I might still have it somewhere. I think I even once offered it for a download, but that was a looooong time ago.
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Oh and if you think reverse engineering this is going to magically replace FF7Music, you're wrong :-P
I already know how FF7 plays music and how I could replace it with my own music player, I just haven't taken the time to do so (because FF7Music just works)
Infact, I have already implemented a "fake midi" mode for the OpenGL driver that completely bypasses FF7s Midi player and does just the bare minimum to make FF7Music work. (You don't have to touch a single midi file or midi device for that)
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Oh, well guess then there is really no point in finding the demo now. Since i believe the point was to get the music code.
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If anyone still wants it, let me know and I'll upload it.
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If anyone still wants it, let me know and I'll upload it.
I'd love to say i want to so i could implement the use of wave in FF7. But i have no technical skill what-so-ever.
@Aali, i know FF7Music works, But for us 64 bit users we have to jump through hoops to get it to work (run in compatibility mode, as admin, use different dll's) plus open it from the FF7Music.exe instead of just FF7.exe (which i don't know about everyone else but there is lag opening up FF7 music for me) Although thankfully coverr has a great guide on getting it working.
Still would be nice to just have FF7 load it (how it should have been i think). But, i've rambled enough :-P
You have enough on your plate with Palmer and your graphics driver (both work amazing i might add, Keep up the good work)
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(because FF7Music just barely works)
fixed.
Of course, that's not to say I'm not completely grateful to ficedula for making FF7Music, it's certainly beyond anything I'm capable of.
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Contributing to the community :-) (http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?ttcjntybnho)
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Be careful obesebear, take it down after a few hours :wink:
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Since it's a demo cd (of a VERY early FFVII) released with magazines... I figure it should be safe to upload. Right?
I don't think it had even been released in Japan yet judging by the models
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Well alright, i dont think square will remember a little demo...
I think it was a Europe exclusive tbh.
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Covarr:
From what I've gathered from your tutorial thread, these are the worst/most common issues;
1. FF7Music does not support newer winamp plugins (would be fixed, at least temporarily, by a replacement)
2. Virtual Store/insufficient privilegies is screwing people over (this is already an issue for my driver aswell)
3. Original MIDI won't shut up (already fixed with my driver, just hasn't been released yet)
I don't see how a replacement could make this situation much better.
That said, I have plans of making a plugin system for the OpenGL driver, separating movies, music and maybe even graphics from the "core" FF7 interoperability. This would allow me to setup (public) development environments for parts of it and perhaps even lure some sucker in to do my bidding, err I mean help me. :evil:
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Covarr:
From what I've gathered from your tutorial thread, these are the worst/most common issues;
1. FF7Music does not support newer winamp plugins (would be fixed, at least temporarily, by a replacement)
2. Virtual Store/insufficient privilegies is screwing people over (this is already an issue for my driver aswell)
3. Original MIDI won't shut up (already fixed with my driver, just hasn't been released yet)
I don't see how a replacement could make this situation much better.
That said, I have plans of making a plugin system for the OpenGL driver, separating movies, music and maybe even graphics from the "core" FF7 interoperability. This would allow me to setup (public) development environments for parts of it and perhaps even lure some sucker in to do my bidding, err I mean help me. :evil:
There are other problems. Sometimes FF7Music arbitrarily won't work at all. It throws a tantrum when you try to use a directory with a space in it. It doesn't handle starting and stopping correctly, frequently continuing a song where it left off when it should start it over, and vice versa, sometimes going so far as to restart a song when you change screens.
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Since it's a demo cd (of a VERY early FFVII) released with magazines... I figure it should be safe to upload. Right?
Yes, it has been released before - even on the interwebs AFAIK, and I really, really doubt that the reason for it not being available anymore would be a request from the right holders - it's just been pruned because it's so bloody old and runs on hardware not even available anymore.
Upload it all you want.
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Contributing to the community :-)
! (http://img530.imageshack.us/img530/2214/28845116.jpg)
There are other problems. Sometimes FF7Music arbitrarily won't work at all. It throws a tantrum when you try to use a directory with a space in it. It doesn't handle starting and stopping correctly, frequently continuing a song where it left off when it should start it over, and vice versa, sometimes going so far as to restart a song when you change screens.
Sigh. I can attest to this, especially the last one :cry: For me the music changes nearly every time I change screen (i.e. go from one screen to another where the same music is played and is supposed to continue). Hearing only the first few seconds of a song gets really annoying after a while. I will make sweet love to anyone that makes a patch or plugin that makes the music play properly. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie)
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I have the issue with the starting and stopping incorrectly and or at random times.
Once i loaded it up and nothing played -.-
I thought it was just cause i was in Win7, guess not
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The only issues I've noticed is that it's looping the fanfare and inn music at some places when it shouldn't, and that it has a problem with spaces in the search paths you specify (which I handled by putting my music in the ficedula directory, which is automatically scanned without having to specify any path)
Anything else I can only imagine being caused by misconfiguration and/or other broken software interacting with it.
But FF7Music is a total hack and an abomination that *should* be replaced with a better solution, I think we can all agree on that one.
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There are other problems. Sometimes FF7Music arbitrarily won't work at all. It throws a tantrum when you try to use a directory with a space in it. It doesn't handle starting and stopping correctly, frequently continuing a song where it left off when it should start it over, and vice versa, sometimes going so far as to restart a song when you change screens.
Sigh. I can attest to this, especially the last one :cry: For me the music changes nearly every time I change screen (i.e. go from one screen to another where the same music is played and is supposed to continue). Hearing only the first few seconds of a song gets really annoying after a while. I will make sweet love to anyone that makes a patch or plugin that makes the music play properly.
Check my post in the FF7Music Sticky. It's probably still the most recent one. There is about a .2 second lag, and everytime you start the game the music will pick up exactly where it left off. But good God it is 100x better than listening to the first 10 seconds over and over and over.
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Ah, I'll give that a try :wink:
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Contributing to the community :-) (http://www.mediafire.com/?sharekey=1119c14185ee887b7432d3c9683f450ae04e75f6e8ebb871)
Ah, sweet PSX demo. This was fun. I don't remember the font being like this, though, or Barret saying "heck" at any point ever.
Too bad it's not the Mt. Corel PC demo, though.
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Here is the Mt. Corel PC demo. It is very buggy though, I couldn't get it to run on Windows XP.
Hope this helps.
http://depositfiles.com/files/4tpe8s4i6 (http://depositfiles.com/files/4tpe8s4i6)
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Yeah, I can't get it working on Win7 x64 either.
Though I imagine a virtual machine with 98 would be able to do it.
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I wonder if the problem stems from already having the official one installed? EDIT-Nope it doesn't
My 3dfx voodoo drivers won't install because I'm running 64-bit and it uses 16-bit?? WTF? I didn't even know 16-bit existed.
I'm almost tempted to see if this will run on my PSP running Win98
Also, I discovered this in the files.
(http://i221.photobucket.com/albums/dd138/obesebear/CG_Cloud2.jpg)
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I dunno how many Windows 98 were made, But i have Windows 98 SE from when y dad upgraded from 95, Will that work to run this in a VM?
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98SE should probably run anything that 98 will run.
The more difficult bit will be emulating a 3dfx card.
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virtualbox does that just fine. Well for XP.. dunno about something so old
It works! (well it boots)
EDIT: yeah just keeps freezing on me at startup, won't let me go to Windows, thought my settings were to high, but at the bare minimum, still freezes ..
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Yeah, i tried it, but it just crashes and asks me to send error report every time.
Also, do NOT try to replace the demo exe with the one from the retail game. I tried it, thinking that the modified exe would help, but it just locked my computer up.
On a side note, i got that picture of cloud as a poster on my wall.
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Be careful installing this Mt Corel demo, it wrecks your FF7 registry entries, and you have to reinstall the final version.
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Be careful installing this Mt Corel demo, it wrecks your FF7 registry entries, and you have to reinstall the final version.
Crap, i didn't test the full game until i read this post just now, and it screwed it up.
Gotta reinstall now...
EDIT:
God damn, now it gets an error with Aali's Opengl driver.
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Clear the registry entries by hand and then reinstall?
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Clear the registry entries by hand and then reinstall?
Actually, it works right if you uninstall the demo then reinstall the game.
I backed up my game files and mods, and everything seems okay now.
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Shaddapp! I am the boss around here, and I say to stop replying to this thread.
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So, which one of the grudge holding, banned ex-members would you be, oh-soon-to-be-banned-again-member?
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What are you talking about? Don't you respect my authority? This is your last warning before I ban you!
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Hmm a person must really have no life if they have to come back to a forum just to "WIND PEOPLE UP."
What a sad lonely Seifer. Ummm, question.... Are you moving in with your mother? You seem to the kind of person who fits the stereotypical bill of the 40 year old who sits in his mom's basement and touches himself to "slutty video game girls."
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It's not Seifer. This is a much older grudge.
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What happened to the link Everstrong posted? :( Can anyone reupload it? :-D
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Another bump, as I'd also be very interested in seeing this demo.
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hmm... this may be a bump, but its quite interesting.
I found the demo disk with FF7 from the PC gamer under my sister's bed.
apparently, because we had too many pc gamer demo disks we were throwing them out,
and she wanted to save that one, but she forgot about it for almost 11 years lol.
when i get the chance ill post a pic.
EDIT:
oh wow, it has the Quake 2 demo as well
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oh man i rember the demo i still try to download it in school to see if it will run on any of the old win 2000 pcs
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Oh i've got that demo, its got the psx music playing the in background too. Why didnt they keep it like that for the final? :?
Were the music files mp3s?
I remember hearing somewhere that the reason FF7 used synthesised music was that the makers couldn't fit the game with mp3 files on three discs. This isn't so much of a problem with the PSX version, but it means that the PC version had the awful sounding MIDIs. Presumably, Square didn't want to go to the trouble of making orchestral versions of everything and putting the game on four discs (not including the install disc), just to make the PC version sound good (@#&%ers!).
There's a significant chance that everything I've just said is a load of crap :lol:
then y say it? lol
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Because there was a small chance that it wasn't :3
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anyone got the mt. corel demo of ff7?
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yeah
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Is there a video of that anywhere? I really don't fancy playing it, but I'd like to watch through it to see the differences.
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I think I might still have the Mt. Corel demo, but I might have deleted it. If I do have it, it's on my external HDD which is currently connected to my Wii. Sometime today I'll see if I can find it.
I refuse to install it, because it fucks up the existing FFVII install, as I learned last time I tried to use it. It's really nothing special to watch, anyway. It's much more interesting from a technical standpoint, as it uses an unfinished version of their PC engine, with streaming WAV music, and maybe some other differences that I hadn't noticed.
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Its just normal FF7 but with PSX music. I wonder why they suddnely changed to Midi? Diskspace maybe? Or it could have been that not many computers could have done it at the time, i dunno.
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More than likely diskspace but in retrospect it seems like they made a lot of mistakes when developing this. I mean even at their base resolution the backgrounds look much worse than the originals must have. Also pictures don't take up THAT much disk space they could have decided to not downsize the images since most monitors were bigger than those background image sizes anyway. Idk I just feel that this game lost a lot of its graphic and audio potential in the packaging process.
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WAV is uncompressed, so I think it would have taken a huge amount of disc space. It's just a pity that the psf format couldn't have been ported over to the PC version, since it allows quality close to mp3s but file sizes more reminiscent of MIDIs :'(
I know little of PC hardware from back then, so I can't say whether WAV music would have made the game harder to run; I don't imagine it would have made it any easier to run...
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System requirements between midi and wav should not be too different as wav is uncompressed and midi is just a file telling the soundcard to place a certain note at a certain pitch for said amount of time. Compressed audio would have been much more demanding.
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More than likely diskspace but in retrospect it seems like they made a lot of mistakes when developing this. I mean even at their base resolution the backgrounds look much worse than the originals must have. Also pictures don't take up THAT much disk space they could have decided to not downsize the images since most monitors were bigger than those background image sizes anyway. Idk I just feel that this game lost a lot of its graphic and audio potential in the packaging process.
No, the backgrounds were IDENTICAL to the PSX version. They only look worse because of the differences between the way a PC monitor and a CRT television display images.
WAV is uncompressed, so I think it would have taken a huge amount of disc space. It's just a pity that the psf format couldn't have been ported over to the PC version, since it allows quality close to mp3s but file sizes more reminiscent of MIDIs :'(
I know little of PC hardware from back then, so I can't say whether WAV music would have made the game harder to run; I don't imagine it would have made it any easier to run...
Pretty much any PC capable of playing this game could handle either WAV or MIDI music, no problem. PSF, not so easily. While it's very lightweight by today's standards, it's rather processor-intensive by 1998 standards, especially given that the first usable version of Neill Corlett's PSF plugin for Winamp wasn't even released until 2002 and wasn't nearly as optimized as current versions. Combine this with the fact that FFVII-PC already doesn't run at full speed on computers that meet-but-don't-exceed the system requirements, it would have been a disaster. Even MP3s were too taxing to use, they had to use an audio format that could be completely handled by the soundcard, without help from the processor (WAV and MIDI both fit this requirement).
As for WAV, the disc space pretty much sums it up. You couldn't fit all the songs in the game in uncompressed WAV format at a decent quality on one CD, as evidenced by the fact that the soundtrack took four (CD-audio is virtually identical to uncompressed WAV). Even if you cut out songs that are only used in specific discs, similar to the FMVs, you couldn't fit all the music, especially alongside game data and FMVs. The only way to manage it would be to significantly lower the audio quality to 8KHz or so, at which point the music would sound significantly worse than the MIDIs, more akin to AM-radio.
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What I meant by the downsizing was when they were in production the artists must have made a much larger image then shrank it to save disk space even though the trade off of a small amount of disk space for shoddy quality was p dumb.
The same goes for the wav files. I mean if they just had multiple install disks and saved most of the game onto the computer like most current day PC games all of these problems could have been solved. I assume the higher ups said make it for playstation and port it to pc as an afterthought. Quite sad. :'(
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The images were ported right from the psx version. Identical resolutions.
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I understand that, but before they put it onto the playstation disks the artists MUST have had a higher quality image.
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I understand that, but before they put it onto the playstation disks the artists MUST have had a higher quality image.
Most likely. Or at least they had the original 3d scenes that could be re-rendered for a higher resolution. Unfortunately they got rid of all of it before the pc port was made.
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I understand that, but before they put it onto the playstation disks the artists MUST have had a higher quality image.
Most likely. Or at least they had the original 3d scenes that could be re-rendered for a higher resolution. Unfortunately they got rid of all of it before the pc port was made.
The PSX versions were rendered at a lower resolution because the visible difference was pretty much nonexistent given the PSX's low resolution.
I'm not so sure that the got rid of the original 3D scenes, but Eidos did not have access to anything that wasn't in the PSX version when they were making the port. For all we know, Squaresoft had all the files, but Eidos never bothered to ask for them.
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Does anyone want to play diplomat an lawyer? :-D
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so where can i download the demo?
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There was a thread about this MONTHS back. I don't know if anyone ever found it, but feel free to search.
I think I posted up 2 old PSX demos, and someone else posted up a PC one.
Report back with your findings at once!
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The old thread is here. (http://forums.qhimm.com/index.php?topic=8578.0)
It's not advisable to install it unless you plan on uninstalling FF7 first, then reinstalling when you're done with the demo. There's a link to the download that broke after about five minutes somewhere in that thread if I remember correcty. I don't plan on installing it.
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Its really not worth installing at all tbh, theres nothing interesting about it.
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I actually found my PC gamer disc with it on it since i started that thread - still want to try it on an older computer, but i wouldn't try it if i were you because it messes up your FF7 registry
entries. Unless you have a PC without an FF7 install don't bother.
Maybe one of the reasons it was removed and forgotten mostly was because of the bugs? Way back when i tried it it crashed a LOT.
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Hey, i used to have the demo, came with my tomb Raider disc( the first one) was never able to get it working though.
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As for WAV, the disc space pretty much sums it up. You couldn't fit all the songs in the game in uncompressed WAV format at a decent quality on one CD, as evidenced by the fact that the soundtrack took four (CD-audio is virtually identical to uncompressed WAV). Even if you cut out songs that are only used in specific discs, similar to the FMVs, you couldn't fit all the music, especially alongside game data and FMVs. The only way to manage it would be to significantly lower the audio quality to 8KHz or so, at which point the music would sound significantly worse than the MIDIs, more akin to AM-radio.
I suppose it have been at all possible to compress the WAVs, then extract to disk, but hard drive space was pretty scarce in those days. Whilst I guess Square *could* have offers two options with regards music, that would have been twice the amount of audio to test and manage. The only alternative I could think of would be a customized MIDI player, but that would be its whole own project, that would have cost a fair bit for (potentially) only one port.
How did FF8-PC deal with music?
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aaaaaaaaahhhh.......... sweet memories. well i don't really know why they had to remove the text in the opening sequence.
(http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20091110213444/finalfantasy/images/b/b9/Intro-demovii.png)
also helping biggs , an event not in the final version.
(http://images1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20091110213443/finalfantasy/images/e/ec/Biggs-demovii.png)
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(http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20091110213444/finalfantasy/images/b/b9/Intro-demovii.png)
Haha, Star Wars much?
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aaaaaaaaahhhh.......... sweet memories. well i don't really know why they had to remove the text in the opening sequence.
(http://images2.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20091110213444/finalfantasy/images/b/b9/Intro-demovii.png)
This would have clarified up a lot of things for me the first time I played it. I didn't even know what Shinra was for a while. I just had to accept the fact that they were evil.
also helping biggs , an event not in the final version.
(http://images1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20091110213443/finalfantasy/images/e/ec/Biggs-demovii.png)
Likely because it's out of the way and they don't bother developing Biggs as a character later. They don't bother developing Jesse either, but she has more of a role in the first 30 mins than Biggs does.
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sorry for necroposting but could anyone reupload the "mt. corel" pc demo ??