PC or PSX for Final Fantasy VIII?

[Changeling]

Hello everyone.  I'm debating on if I should play FF8 on the PC or an emulator like ePSXe.  Yes, I do have both copies of the game, I did not download the illegally.

Let me start off by saying I have a huge widescreen monitor, the resolution goes up to 1900x1200.  That creates a problem because of the 2D backgrounds stretching. 

Correct me if I'm wrong but, here are the pros and cons of the PC version

PC Pros:

The Character Model's animations aren't so...jumpy, if you get what I mean.
Was able to enable Anti-Aliasing and Anisotropic filtering
Changed the music to Samuel's soundfont...so the music's fine in my opinion


PC Cons:

2D Backgrounds looks stretched
The World map looks terrible compard to the PSX version.

I'm not sure if I could describe the cons of the PSX version.  I haven't been able to find the right settings in ePSXe for my computer specs.  But so far I guess I could say

PSX Pros:
The Resolution can be turned up higher than 640x480
Better World Map
Filtering can be applied

PSX Cons:
Models are Jumpy
ePSXe is complicated

Well anyway, I apologize if this post is sloppy, I'm extremely tired.  My question for you all is, do you have any experience with ePSXe?  If so, could you provide good settings for an ATI x800xl and a big widescreen monitor?  Also, in your opinion, which would be the better experience?

Thank you very much

[stormmedia]

I say the PC version because the graphics and sound with the emualator is not realy good.  Especialy the sound ... well I did play both of them and with the PSX version the music was not sounding good.  With the PC it's realy better and it will be even better once I gonna have finish my SFFS(Stormmedia Final Fantasy Sound) project.  I think just for the music it worth to try it on PC.  Well with the PSX emulator you have the adventage of being able to save wherever you want even if there no save point but.. I think it doesn't worth the lake of music quality of the emulators with this game... however with ffIX the music was good... don't know how they did it... perhaps they somehow hadded a soft syth with the game.

Well I hopw this will help you

Here if you want to try some simple of my project but there is only simples of ff7 but it'll give you an idea of how it will sound:

http://forums.qhimm.com/index.php?topic=5553.25

[zero88]

I say the PC version because the graphics and sound with the emualator is not realy good.  Especialy the sound ... well I did play both of them and with the PSX version the music was not sounding good.  With the PC it's realy better and it will be even better once I gonna have finish my SFFS(Stormmedia Final Fantasy Sound) project.  I think just for the music it worth to try it on PC.  Well with the PSX emulator you have the adventage of being able to save wherever you want even if there no save point but.. I think it doesn't worth the lake of music quality of the emulators with this game... however with ffIX the music was good... don't know how they did it... perhaps they somehow hadded a soft syth with the game.

How do you figure that the sound is bad? Use Eternal's SPU plug-in; that plug-in gave me perfect sound with minimal CPU usage on any game I tried.

Personally, I'd probably take the PC version. This is because if you're going to play it on the PC, it might as well be the port, because I can tell you now that installing and running the PC version will probably give you a lot less headaches than configuring ePSXe properly--that is, if your computer and video card aren't too good.

If, however, you have nice computer specs and a good video card with lots of VRAM, then you can potentially generate a much better-looking Final Fantasy VIII in an emulator than on the PC port.

The PC version is less likely to have bugs, too, since PlayStation emulation is still having all the kinks worked out, though Final Fantasy VIII is such a widely known game that it's mostly fine. Try a little bit of each out, and see what looks/sounds the best.

[stormmedia]

Well I used Eternal's SPU plug-in it's just that the PC version had better midi sound... and a little less bugs.. well for me and as I said the midi will sound even better soon with my project hehe

Edit:

I should add that perhaps my project will be ready sooner for ff8 than ff7 because ff7 has a code problem that make the CPU usage realy high when it doesn't need it and dziugo is fixing it so as soon as he got this fix I will be able to realase it on ff7 but I won't until it's fixed... and for ff8 I'll test it soon to see if this game have the same problem.. if it don't I will probably realase it sooner but it will have some lag with ff7 until dziugo have this fixed.

[Covarr]

The PC version takes less time to go between areas. That's a good reason to choose that one.

[rmco2003]

You could always try pSX if you're having problems with epsxe, it seems to run loads of games perfectly.