Random Crashes in FF7

[froglenn]

Hi, I've been looking through your forums for an answer to my random crashes in ff7, but I haven't found a problem that seems to exactly or even remotely the same as my current one. Sorry if this has been answered before and it's my own foolishness.

The problem is, FF7 crashes randomly in game for me, the FMVs run just fine and almost everything is fine until suddenly, the whole screen freezes up and I go straight back to my desktop.

I'm running Win98se and have tried using software rendering, direct3D acceleration (through the riva patch, though the nvidia box is not checked) and all 3 choices of resolutions, but still to no avail. The ff7config.exe file states that i pass all tests, even the 8-bit palette one, which indicates that the game should work.

My specs are: 800Mhz AMD Duron, GeForce2MX 100/200 32Mb, 128Mb RAM

Note: The CD is 100% authentic, legal and not scratched at all.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, again, sorry if this has been answered already.

[corpse]

Well This worked for me on XP.

What you want to is get the 1.02 patch http://www.ff7-universe.com/Downloads/ff7_102.zip

Only extract the FF7 config file, do not replace the FF7.exe file. These random crashes should now be fixed.

PS
You may at some point need Chocobo race fix, I would reccomend installing this when needed then replace original exe after race.

[Aaron]

You may at some point need Chocobo race fix, I would reccomend installing this when needed then replace original exe after race.

The chocobo race fix changes only four bytes in ff7.exe (a memory address IIRC), which do not affect anything else.  It shouldn't be necessary to "unpatch" after you pass the chocobo races...

[atzn]

I don't really think the chocobo patch is needed since the poster stated that the OS is win98se and afaik the fix is only for win2k/xp.

[Qhimm]

The "problem" addressed by the chocobo patch most certainly exists in win98 as well, though since these OSes are much less strict in preventing the programmer from doing stupid shit, they allow the program to execute. Fortunately, since it's a non-critical read instruction anyway, the game doesn't crash from it anyway.

And as Aaron stated, the chocobo patch does not affect any other part of the game other than skipping past one troublesome instruction in the the chocobo races. It is entirely safe to install.