FF8 Display is Sketchy

[wildlikechildren]

Hello again,

First off just want to say this forum is pretty incredible, wouldn't have gotten anywhere without it. So I've finally got FF8 installed and running on my laptop. I've applied the ff8sqeanvpatch for nVIDIA GeForce, used RivaTuner to enable Antialiasing as mentioned in the FF7 FAQ, and used IsoBuster & Daemon Tools to play directly off my harddrive. I found that enabling Antialiasing made the picture display smoother overall, but all the outlines are still somewhat sketchy. It looks like small strecks running horizontally close up so the outlines are more of a zig-zag than straight. This makes reading text especially bothersome. I know it's only a display issue because I tried to do a printscreen to show you what I was talking about but the captured image looked fine.

I'm not sure if this is the issue with nVIDIA GeForce that the patch was supposed to fix and I applied the patch incorrectly. I just unpacked it to the main FF8 directory (lettting it over write some of the files) and ran EAXUnified, but it unpacked everything to a Temp directory under Local Settings, which I thought seemed kinda odd. 

I'm not completely useless with computers but this sorta stuff is over my head, so any feedback would really be appreciated. Even just letting me know if what I have done makes sense or not. Cheers!

[Az]

Hmm, I had the same problem a while ago.
I just reinstalled the game, and it worked perfectly.
Could it be your screen resolution?   

[wildlikechildren]

Thanks for the reply, I've tried re-installing it and there's no change. I'll take a look at my screen resolution, do you know is there a  recommended setting for FF8?

[Aaron]

Screen resolution doesn't matter, FF8 changes it to 640x480.

If you took a screenshot and it looked fine, the problem is probably with the LCD screen on your laptop.  LCD screens don't actually change resolutions, when the display is lower than the native resolution of the screen, it is scaled up to match the native resolution of the screen.  This can make the image look blurry, and maybe even make edges look a little more "jagged."

A possible fix may be to run FF8 in a window, using FF8w (search for it).