PS1 Quality Games on GBA!!!

[Kazuya Mishima]

I meant they look, while in game, like childs but when you watch the fmv they look like adults and you get an idea of how they really are. but if we always watch them in game with no fmv then it would be like the ff in nes and snes: you will never know how they will look like if they used realistic graphics.

[ZappaZ]

wouldnt the easiest way be to include still pix from the
psx fmv:s??

[Cyberman]

Let me use the Example of FF7 (classic)
1) one can't use the FMV's from the PSX.. too big (motion JPEG encoding at 320x224), I suppose rescaling them to to 240x160 or 160x112 would work.
2) the GBA can only display 15 bit color so the color resolution is significantly less than the 24 bits on the PSX, this means that you don't need as acurate encoding (AKA less) the lumanance information is where things need to be compressed. However by shear numbers they would need 1/4 the amount of data for the GBA. IE the 44meg opening movie with motion JPEG encoding becomes 11meg. Using low quality DIVX it should be more like 3 or 4 meg (almost tolerable).
3) Getting rid of FMV's actually means a few major changes to the game. They are used in a number of sequences with the characters overlayed on them. Not that this is a bad thing, it just means a number of script changes. I would suggest careful removal of FMV's because unless you wish to make a low rez model of midgard that zooms into detail in at least ten major locations it's a bit unrealistic.
Movies used within the first 20 minutes of the game:
Opening 44 megs 3d overlay in the last 5 seconds of animation.
After Cloud meets Barrent
5 seconds zoom with 3d overlay of cloud.
The next one is when the reactor blows up.. another 8 seconds of animation.
3 FMV's all with 3d mixed in.
4) backgrounds scripts and models would need to all changes. The scripting affects the engine by knowing the state of the game (IE what events have ocurred) settings are slightly different. For example Rocket town without the rocket etc.

So.. for some games eliminating FMV's will change there look dramatically. FF7 for example has 200megs of COMPRESSED data for all the models backgrounds etc. and the world map.

Cyb