Thinking of starting over with bootleg, advice needed

[countach]

Hello!

First of, I am new here but I'm an old avid FF fan and have played through FF7 on the Playstation I don't know how many times.
Anyway, it has now come to my attention that it is possible to play FF7 with HD models and music and that led me to this site and I gotta say it's looking pretty impressive. Now before I start digging into this whole bootleg business I could use some help/advice!

1. I have never played FF7 on PC before (MIDI sound really put me off), but from what I've understood, you can play bootleg with the Playstation sound (OST) or even custom tracks? For example would it possible to use some of the "The Black Mages" tracks as battle music? That would be awesome.

2. Does the PC game have gamepad support? I guess if the answer is no, perhaps it would work with a 3rd party program like Joy2Key?

3. How stable is bootleg? How many have actually finished a complete story without crashing, glitching etc.? I'm curious because it would really suck if the game crashed xx hours into the story without being able to continue.

4. Are the loading times faster in the PC version compared to the Playstation version? Does installing on a SSD disc grant any real performance compared to a standard HDD?

5. Changing models and/or sound and continuing from a saved game, is this possible? Or do I have to start a brand new game every time I change a setting?

Well that's what I have in mind so far, I hope someone can clarify, would be most appreciated.

cheers!

[Lionsmane]

I would say most of what you're worried about can be avoided/accomplished.

2. You can play the game with a gamepad, I think this depends heavily on what type you're using. I have a cheap generic one that picks up fine in windows 7 with no third parties.

1. Not sure about inserting custom tracks, but bootleg gives you plenty of choices with music other than midi files.

3. Bootleg is very stable, you just have to find the right configurations for your machine and possible do some troubleshooting. This all depends on your set up. I would run through the tifa's bootleg tutorial and look through faqs to see if people have had problems you could see yourself having.

4. Not sure on this one, most likely going to depend on your computers set up.

5. You can switch models with certain tools, idk about music. Their are tools available that allow you also to manipulate save files and change character stats, item counts, etc.

Theres a thread here also with countless save files that you can always download too. And if something is missing in the file you find closest to yours, the tool "black chocobo" can help you alter it.

[Rundas]

I've been around for a while (no offence to previous answer) and I can say with 99% certainty:
1. You can play with PSX OST, custom tracks, or my preference, remastered versions with real synthesized instruments such as Final FanTim's Remastered OST.
2. It has native support built in before modding.
3. Bootleg is 100% stable, you should have no problems unless you have Intel HD graphics (no physical card).
4. Loading times are completely negligible.
5. You can re-Bootleg at any time as long as you fresh install, to keep your saves just move them then move them back when you're done.

[countach]

Thanks for your answers, sounds good to me

After fiddling around for some time I finally got it working just as I wanted it!

Only thing is I cant have shaders enabled because then the screen will be completely white, and I don't want to roll back my nvidia drivers since I also play modern games on this computer. How much impact does the shader have anyway?

About 5., so you're saying as long as I backup my save file I'm free to re-install with new mods that change gfx/sound? That's awesome!

Now I only need to figure out what difficulty mod to use. I wanna stick close to the original but have a little more challenge, hmmm...

[Rundas]

Shaders have little to no visual impact ATM. As for difficulty, I recommend this.