FF8 & FF7 PC version verses Emulator versions.

I know this has been done before, But after countless hours of trying to get these games to work With the Geforce 4, I eventually bought a Voodoo2 card, (and runs well on a Voodoo2) But... Once your used to FSAA 4x and Geforce 4 MX image quality it's really hard to play on a Voodoo2)

There is no way to get these games to work on a Geforce 4 MX or Geforce 4 Ti, You have to use newer drivers and the older ones don't support these cards.


So basically.... I went out and bought ff8 for the psx ( I alrdy had ff7 and was very impressed with its emulation with epsxe) And now I'm doing it for ff8. It's sad that I have had to buy this game twice now just so I can play it on something that stronger than my old System.

Using Petes OpenGL or Petes DX6 Plugins, This game looks incredible.

This just hands down proves that emulation is going to be the best way to play these games in the future, (unless squaresoft or eidos releases more patches, which I find highly unlikely). Or you can just buy a PSX and be satisified with the hideous pixels...

*sigh* To put this bluntly. I hate you eidos and squaresoft for creating such lousy ports!

And I thank you epsxe, Pete, Nick, And lewpy for creating such a fine emulator and plugins.

[Exophase]

Well said.
After hearing emulator authors again and again say "buy the ports, they'll always be better than anything emulated" it's nice to know they were wrong. Sometimes being wrong on things like this is a pleasant surprise.

- Exo

[Phoenix Flame]

Aside from the compatibility problems, I actually thought that the ports of FFVII and FFVIII were pretty good. It's plainly obvious that they're direct ports of PSX versions but they've put in little things that just help to make the game a little nicer. Take for example the Hi-res FMVs and fonts in FFVIII - after seeing those for ages the PSX version of FFVIII looks chunk.

Oh I agree they look nice. But honestly if you've Played Epsxe FF8 in 1027x786 Mode with 4x FSAA it kinda negates the flare those high resolution fonts and movies have...




They just shouldn't call it a Direct3d as it's glaring incompatible with most Direct3d cards.

I'm just a slight bit irritated with Electronic Arts And eidos. It;s just ridiculous that it was this bad.


Edit: I couldn't figure out why But on my brother 400 mhz Celeron with a Voodoo3 PCI with 96 megs of ram, The games (low res) movies skipped like mad, The only way to make that game playable on his system is to use quarter screen. Which I found rather strange since I had a 233 Mhz System with a Voodoo2 that ran it at great speed and the movies were fine...

[Demigod]

To be fair, FF7 PC was done by Eidos but FF8 was done by Square Electronic Arts LLC. Eidos lost the contract for FF8 after the piss poor porting job they did with FF7 and Square assigned their own people to do it. The thing is, Square didn't do any better at porting the game than Eidos and in fact they copied the FF7 format. I guess they didn't have the time and/or technical knowledge of the PC to do a proper port. The only thing they improved were the FMVs and font. I agree the two games should have had better Direct3D support, especially FF8, but I guess they thought it wasn't that important, that the games would speak for themselves. I would personally like to see a PC version of FF9 and perhaps FF 10 as well but unless Square really gets serious about developing for the PC it won't happen. They'll just end up making another lousy port again.

[Goku7]

Remember, back when FF7PC was made, nVidia had yet to stage their Gfx card performance monoply. In fact, I don't think the company was around then (PLEASE correct me if I'm wrong, I don't know too much about the history of nVidia). If that is the case, then you really can't blame SquareSoft for not coding for a series of cards that did not exist then.

Part of the blame does lie on nVidia, though, for not looking into finding some good answers to the compatiblity problems (like a good consumer-centered company should).

Not that SquareSoft should completely escape the blame. They certainly did a sloppy job on FF8, especially the music end (but, without that, then the [i]Final Fantasy SoundFont Project[i] wouldn't exist.). They certainly COULD have done better. Actually, I'm still scratching my head at why my 1.5GHz P4 with 256 megs of DDR RAM has sound skipping problems on the hi-res movies.

SquareSoft might be trying to atone for their mistakes by NOT making PC versions of FF9 and FFX.

SquareSoft might be trying to atone for their mistakes by NOT making PC versions of FF9 and FFX.

Or just trying to save themselves the embarrassment of another sloppy port.

[Kane]

I think ChrisRay's view is more likely to be honest.

[Demigod]

Originally posted by Goku7
Remember, back when FF7PC was made, nVidia had yet to stage their Gfx card performance monoply. In fact, I don't think the company was around then (PLEASE correct me if I'm wrong, I don't know too much about the history of nVidia). If that is the case, then you really can't blame SquareSoft for not coding for a series of cards that did not exist then.

FF7 PC was released on June 25, 1998. At that time 3Dfx was the performance king and had a much larger influence on the market than any other company. The best Nvidia had then was the Riva 128 which had performance comparable to a Voodoo 1 (the TNT was released a month after the FF7 release date). It was also Nvidia's first "real" product. The NV1 failed miserably (and nearly put them out of business ) and the NV2 was never released so the Riva 128 (NV3) was their first successful product. As you can imagine they hadn't quite established their presence in the market yet so it's easy to see why Eidos had overlooked them. Still, they put in support for ATI and S3 cards which were horribly underpowered.

[Andronicus]

Actually, I like the port version better.

Probably because you have a card compatible with it.

I used to. But it's been nothing but problems with geforce cards and that game.

[neural-shock]

I'll stick to the emulated versions. they look A LOT better in my computer.

[flatbush27]

i don't remember who said this, but it is someone in emuforums if i remember correctly:

"why do we use emulation? to enhance the graphics, of course."

or something like that. and i agree. emulation is better.

[Zell]

well that's partially True !But if thee is an PC version you should buy it for PC !!

[flatbush27]

Originally posted by Zell
well that's partially True !But if thee is an PC version you should buy it for PC !!

why do that when you can enhance your original game's graphics for free?

[Exodus]

stability mainly. not all the emulations are perfect when trying to add better graphics. and it can be tricky to get the best config

[john2]

I prefer playing those games with epsxe as it's far better than the pc versions (just look ff7 videos with epsxe and then see the pc version ).Yes FF8 was very good indeed but......it could have been and better,right?

[john2]

Oup's.......i mean as they're far better

[Demigod]

Both FF7 and FF8 PC work really well on my Voodoo 2 so I have no complaints with them. A good thing about the PC versions is that their system requirements are much lower than the emulated ones. My friend claimed to have played FF7 on a Pentium 100 with a Voodoo 1 with decent frame rates. You couldn't possibly do that with FF7 on epsxe. FF8 also played full speed on my old Celeron 366 with a Voodoo 2.

[Andronicus]

Originally posted by Exodus
stability mainly. not all the emulations are perfect when trying to add better graphics. and it can be tricky to get the best config

You were right, I choose the PC version cause I want a stability in gameplay. If we choose emulation and the game is not working, we have to wait for a long time for fix and it depends on author to do it or not.