Perfect PC for FF7

[jan3sobieski]

Hi, this has been bothering me for a while and I'd like to get everyone's opinion.

I first played through ff7 around 1997 on my Pentium 133mhz with 32mb or ram and with a 3dfx voodoo rush card. The game played almost perfectly, just a tid bit slow in some places.

As I have accumulated a lot, and i mean a lot of hardware over the years, I'd like to know what is the perfect PC to run FF7 on? (I'm saying a lot, because i have a lot of different processors, ram and stuff, so i can build a pc with almost any configuration)
I'm saying "perfect pc" because of all the mini games, the bike escape, the snowboarding game, chocobo races and everything else to run the way it was meant to.

I was thinking of putting together a pentium 200mmx with 64mb of ram and a Monster3d (voodoo 1) card and sound blaster Awe 64 gold. Would this be the ultimate machine to play ff7 on without any mods? (except the 1.02 patch of course)

The thing is, with the FF7Music mod and Aali's opengl driver, it's hard to pass on the opportunity to use better music, which i'd probably be unable to use on the pentium 200. I haven't played through the game with those mods yet, but so far i'm having a problem with the music in the first mako reactor and it's discouraging me from playing the game on my machine (i'm running win7, 64bit)

And another question that's been bothering me is: Using Aali's opengl driver, does the game actually look better than if i ran it on 640x480 on a voodoo card on an older compuer, or does the driver only allow you to play on a machine running higher resolution, but doesn't actually improve any visuals? I'm confused.

[obesebear]

And another question that's been bothering me is: Using Aali's opengl driver, does the game actually look better than if i ran it on 640x480 on a voodoo card on an older compuer, or does the driver only allow you to play on a machine running higher resolution, but doesn't actually improve any visuals? I'm confused.

Use the most powerful PC you have.  The models in FF7 should not be jaggy, at all.  By running it in 640x480 there are only so many pixels on the screen so jagged lines will exist.  Now if you put those same models in a 1920x1080 environment with driver that supports it, those models will look much smoother.  The background files may not look the best, but that's being worked on as we speak

[titeguy3]

The question isn't really with your PC or video card, it's whether your monitor will support the higher resolution. Most laptop monitors won't cut it.

[Kudistos Megistos]

The custom graphics driver can play the game at any resolution, so it's best to play it at he highest res possible. Even if it's only something like 1440x900, it'll be much better than 640x480.

[jan3sobieski]

how exactly will it be better than 640x480 other than generating models, like obesebear explained. That actually makes sense. Other than getting rid of jagged lines in the models the visuals on a 640x480 voodoo card will be exactly the same, will they not? Or am I missing something?
The thing that discourages me from playing ff7 on a fast pc is that all these mods are made so that the game runs "normal" on fast pc's. (Apart from the FF7Music mod which actually improves the audio experience of the game, unfortunately it's not running fine on a win7 64 bit machine, see my other post, and I have to use it since midi gets messed up on a win7 pc during cutscenes). Why not just play the game on an old pc and not have to worry about anything? Is the minibike chase still running to fast on modern PC's, or has that been fixed?
I don't want to play the game running all these mods and then in a certain point of the game there's going to be a glitch or something and then i'll have to wait until it's fixed and it just ruins the game for me.

[Kudistos Megistos]

Well, it looks much better to me at least 

And it's very noticeable when using detailed models like Apz's Cloud; it looks much better when playing at a high resolution. Overall there's a general smoothness to the models when playing in high-res mode; you'll see the difference best if you play in low-res then play in high-res soon afterwards.

And almost all of the glitches have been fixed by the custom graphics driver, so it plays as well (if not better) on a modern PC as it does on an old one for which it was designed. There are a few other advantages to making it work for a newer machines as well; not everyone has an old machine lying around, older computers might have problems with graphical mods and people might want to do things like make videos o the game or do other demanding things whilst playing it.

[Aali]

You'd rather have the known fatal errors instead?

The only reason it runs well on Win95 is that it doesn't crash when something goes wrong, it just corrupts something and chugs along. Which is fine as long as it's not messing up anything *important*, but keep it running long enough and it will eventually turn into a huge steaming pile of garbage and if you're lucky it won't bring the entire computer down with it.

And even if for some reason you really are unable to progress at some point in the game with all those mods (you don't really need anything other than the OpenGL driver if you're just interested in playing the original game), you could always boot up that old PC of yours and play through that section. Savegames are always compatible, after all.

[jan3sobieski]

Hi Aali!
You've done such an amazing job with that mod I don't even know where to begin. I honestly feel humbled you even respoded to my post.
As I don't know anything about the game's actual programing, I didn't know that's how the game operates on a win95/98. Like I wrote before, I played the game on that computer a long time ago and didn't experience any errors that's why I thought the game runs without problems on older machines.
I noticed you fixed a lot of game bugs in your opengl driver, but I thought these bugs only surfaced because of the mod and weren't there in the original release.

So I'm guessing the only reason I can't enjoy the game on my pc is that because I'm running win7 (midi problem and FF7music problem)? Is the game more or less "perfect" with the opengl driver mod on an XP machine? What's still not running "normally?"

Kudistos: i think i know what you mean, the models don't look... hmm.. "grainy?"

[obesebear]

So I'm guessing the only reason I can't enjoy the game on my pc is that because I'm running win7 (midi problem and FF7music problem)? Is the game more or less "perfect" with the opengl driver mod on an XP machine? What's still not running "normally?"

I'm running Win7 x64 build 7201 and the game and all mods run flawlessly for me.  Even better than it did on XP! What's your problem?  Feel free to post in depth pics of your setup

[Prince Lex]

I don't really know what you mean jan3, I'm running it on Win7 with FF7Music etc and I haven't had a problem yet.

With my old XP installation I used to get random crashes every now and then, but I haven't had a crash or any other bug AT ALL while playing through this time, and I was playing for 5 hours straight the other day. There's really no need to build an old computer, just install the fixes and patches you want and go.

[jan3sobieski]

Well, the original problem that i had was that the midi music would turn off during a cutscene (blowing up the 1st mako reactor) Basically ff7 turns the volume down on midi, but since vista and win7 have no separate midi/sound volume sliders, ff7 effectively turns off all the sounds/music. I tried someone's idea of installing a virtual midi device, unfortunately it didn't work for me.
Then i figured, i'll just install FF7Music and replace the midi's with the psx music. That works to a point. After any battle in the first mako reactor during the first mission, the music just turns off, sounds are still ok, but no music. "obey stops" function does not fix the issue, so back to square one. This will happen in any situation similar to first mako mission where all the music is replaced by what I call "mission music."
Everything else has been ok, but I haven't played through the whole game yet because those bugs are annoying.
Another important thing are the minigames. I want to play through the bike/snowboarding/chocobo races normally. I'm not sure if all the issues with those have been fixed and i don't want to find out that they haven't once i get there.

Can you maybe post a screenshot of all your configuration screens in FF7Music? Maybe I'm doing something wrong.

[obesebear]

Sounds to me like you're doing everything right.  The music cutting off when escaping the reactor is a known problem and does occur at other points in the game.  But like you said, it's because there is no midi control for Win7.  Aali knows about this, and I think he's working on fixing it somehow.

[jan3sobieski]

Is that true Aali? Is there any hope of getting that fixed?