Goku7: No, I can't try that ... I don't have your card! I don't know exactly how the edge smoothing on the V3 works.
The way I "simulated" having a Voodoo card (as far as the font went...) was just to limit the maximum texture size to 256x256 instead of the video cards default. That way, the engine acts exactly as it would when encountering a card who's maximum really *was* 256x256, i.e. Voodoo.
So I'm pretty certain the screenshot I posted is how the font'd look on a Voodoo.
My *personal* opinion is that smoothing is not going to help at all. Smoothing is generally a very light blur effect after all, to get rid of sharp pixel edges. The font suffers from exactly the opposite problem - too damn blurry!
Um, by the words of your post, you sound like you haven't actually seen the screenshot ... yes/no?
Oh, and in order to load the FF8 font into a Voodoo card then yes it *would* have to split it. There's only two things you can do if you want to use a texture larger than 256x256 on a Voodoo:
a) Scale it down
b) Slice it into multiple sections
That's about it; not a lot else possible.
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Reznor: Yes, I know that. However it *really doesn't matter* for the 2d images. Filtering the 2d images you don't notice a quality drop going up to 800x600 from 640x480. Now, if you *weren't* filtering the images then you're perfectly correct, choosing a resolution that scales perfectly is the best way to ensure proper display. But we are going to filter them, there's no reason not to...
The only type of image where filtering won't necessarily fix problems with scaling to a non-exact-multiple resolution (you know what I mean!) is an image with sharp, distinct shapes and edges. To wit, the font. That won't scale up too well (it doesn't).
However, since that gets distributed with the game we can always distribute multiple fonts (crappy, but hey...).