Alright I don't mean to sound ignorant or like an idiot by posting this as I realize a lot of people have suffered this same problem, I just installed final fantasy 7 on my windows XP (sp2) rig which has an ati radeon 9800XT may I add; and I seem to get a blackscreen when I try to load the game.
Now to remedy this problem I have tried installing the correct codecs as I figured the problem is related to the AVI files that final fantasy 7 uses.
I think that this may be the problem as when the game starts I can hear the eidos theme music playing but I cannot see the eidos logo (screen remains blank), after the theme music has played the game completely freezes and locks out my computer (ctrl+alt+delete doesn't work either).
I can view the in-game avi files on my final fantasy 7 disks with windows media player and winamp so I don't believe the problem is codec related.
I have also tried the official eidos 1.02 english patch as that is the version of final fantasy 7; I use to no avail.
I have trawled through this forum in search of a solution to this problem and the same result seems to turn up : install 1.02; or make sure the correct codecs are installed however neither has rectified the problem.
Any help would be greatly appreciated, thankyou in advance!