Final Fantasy VII

[AutoAdmin]

Feel free to rate and discuss this game.

[Litude]

The best game in the Final Fantasy series. Great story, great characters, great music, great atmosphere and the oh so familiar Final Fantasy gameplay. Guess that pretty much sums up this game. Also the last great Final Fantasy game (VIII and IX were decent, but the newer games have been really disappointing).

[leilei]

I didn't like 7 very much.

486 users' note: CRASHES ON FF7CONFIG.EXE due to the timestamp counter instruction getting the CPU speed on the first panel. Sad because in theory, with a game with integer precision all over the game's graphics, would have worked.

TECHNICAL NOTE: Demo supports Glide only; full version supports Software mode, Direct3D and Glide (iirc on that last one) and uses MIDI music rather than ADPCM WAV in the demo.

[DOSGuy]

I was using a Pentium II 350 when FF7 for PC came out, having recently retired my 486 DX 33. It ran great, even though I didn't have a 3dfx graphics card.

[leilei]

Well the whole 486 thing is because i'm a masochist. I try to run everything XD

It doesn't really "depend" on 3dfx exclusive features or anything, even onboard laptop 3d from 1998, and even ATI Rage is good for it. PSX->PC ports tend to be very widely supported no matter how "epic" the scale of the game is, and presuming leaving integer precision intact, would have more support on 486s than traditional 3D PC games - even Metal Gear Solid works on a 486 because of that. (with a supported PCI 3d card, of course)

[Litude]

TECHNICAL NOTE: Demo supports Glide only; full version supports Software mode, Direct3D and Glide (iirc on that last one) and uses MIDI music rather than ADPCM WAV in the demo.

I'm not sure what rendering modes the demo supports, but it does use MIDI music. It's the earlier PC Gamer exclusive(?) demo that uses WAV music.

[DOSGuy]

Well the whole 486 thing is because i'm a masochist. I try to run everything XD

Windows 95 isn't much fun on a 486. We were running Windows 95 on Pentium 75s at school and they were the slowest things ever. Win95 ran fine on my Pentium II 350 with 64 MB of RAM, but I tripled the RAM to 192 MB later and there was a noticeable speed improvement.

They recommend a Pentium 166 for running this game. I recommend a Pentium 166 for running the operating system!

[leilei]

Windows 95 isn't much fun on a 486. We were running Windows 95 on Pentium 75s at school and they were the slowest things ever.

Either Ie4 must have been installed (with its "enhancements"), or the RAM was little (8mb was often installed with OEM P75's - I also assume these are Gateway 2000s also, their OEM Pentiums get fast from 100MHz up.)

It's the earlier PC Gamer exclusive(?) demo that uses WAV music.

That's the only demo i've tried back in the day so I assumed it was the same. I do still have the archive of that if you want...

[Litude]

Thanks for the offer, but I already have the CD the demo was originally published on. Should probably add it to my other thread but it's ~50Mb so I'm having a bit of trouble finding a place to host it.

[DOSGuy]

You can email it to me and I'll put it online when I get home next week. In the meantime, I'll increase the upload limit so that you can store in the forum for now.

Our P75s probably didn't have much RAM. They weren't Gateway 2000, though; our school went with Dell.

[Litude]

Well I did get it uploaded here, though I'm not too sure for how long I can keep it up due to its size.

[DOSGuy]

Well, that was a wasted day.

I tried to run the PC Gamer Demo in Windows XP, but there is no Compatibility setting that works. I tried installing a copy of Windows 98 SE in Bochs, but it was slow and was limited to 640x480x16. I installed Windows 98 SE in VirtualBox, but with no Guest Additions, I had no sound and was limited to 640x480x16. I installed Windows 98 SE in Virtual PC 2007, since it has Virtual Machine Additions for Windows 98, and Win98 works like a charm. It's fast, it has sound, and supports 32-bit color at 800x600. I can install Final Fantasy VII, but it won't run, no matter what display settings I use.

I've been at it for 9 hours, and I just can't get this demo to work.

[leilei]

The demo is Glide only. As far as I know 3dfx support in virtual machines is just starting to barely exist in software emulation form in DOSBox and that's still in early development and unusable. You're wasting a bit of time with the virtual machines - the only ones that do have accelleration are VMWare and VirtualBox, and that's only on NT5+ platforms, not Win9X, and it's also not Glide.

Your best chance of getting it working is throwing a Voodoo2 in a Win9X computer - i'm not even sure a Voodoo Banshee or better would even work.

I've never tried it with Zeckensack's old Glide wrapper. Try that (in your Host OS)?

[DOSGuy]

No luck with Zeckensack in Windows XP, or running Windows 98 SE within Virtual PC 2007.

I've just tried half a dozen Glide wrappers, and none of them have helped.

[Litude]

I was quite surprised to learn about the existence of this, but it seems like there's also an updated version of the "world" demo (officially the internet demo is called the "battle demo", whilst the other one is called the "world demo"). It's quite hefty in size, 70 Mb, but this one actually made it in game on my Windows 7. It did crash when trying to enter the menu or attempting to proceed to the next area, but still it should be considerably more compatible than the earlier world demo.

The demo has been compiled at about the same time the full game was finished, so compatibility is probably pretty much identical. On a Windows 95 or 98 machine, I'd expect the demo to work quite well as it doesn't require Glide support anymore.

Download it here.

EDIT: Actually scarp that regarding the compatibility, just tried with Windows 95 compatibility mode and I managed to play through the whole demo.