FF8 Launcher - Custom resolutions and 8-bit paletted textures fix (patch)

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Wow, nice find on the eax.dll that fixes the launching of it.

I finally get to use it.. after trying everything under the sun! Now my game has huge graphical lag, and i barely get like 10 FPS. I give up, jesus hates me.

(for the record, Geforce 8600 GTS, Athlon 64 X2 4200+, 2gb ram, no AA on, forceware 169.25 drivers)

Glad that vista people will finally get to enjoy it though.
 
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OMGOMGOMGOMG!!!!!11 It worxxxx... Did a stupid trick and it works!!!
Now a tut how to do this:

Got FF8 to run on Vista x86 without any Graphic Glitches
You need:


Now installing:

  • Install FF8 normally, EAX will install itself at the end of the installation
  • Copy 1.2 patch files to installation directory (no Game subfoler at all!)
  • Copy the loader files to the installation directory
  • Install the Visual C++ 2008 runtime
  • Got to the software deinstallation in the control center and UNINSTALL eax unified
  • Extract the new downloaded eax.dll to {Windir}/system32

Now the fun:

  • Run FF8_Loader.exe, Set Resolution to whatever, check the 8bit paletted texture fix checkbox, click PLAY and enjoy! :)
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That's great! Works like a charm on my Creative X-Fi as well!

I'm not sure what I was on about earlier when I commented on the sound quality in Vista. After trying out both the EAX.dll technique and the Creative ALchemy one (same result but using Alchemy EAX can be enabled in the FF8 Config utility - no idea if it has any actual implication on the quality of sound) I have to say that the sound quality is good, if not great. It's identical to the sound in XP using the Mirosoft Synthesizer.

I'll make sure to include the EAX.dll in the next version on the launcher.

Wow, nice find on the eax.dll that fixes the launching of it.

I finally get to use it.. after trying everything under the sun! Now my game has huge graphical lag, and i barely get like 10 FPS. I give up, jesus hates me.

(for the record, Geforce 8600 GTS, Athlon 64 X2 4200+, 2gb ram, no AA on, forceware 169.25 drivers)

Glad that vista people will finally get to enjoy it though.
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I really wish I could help you with this problem but I have no idea what might cause it. Ryg reported that the launcher worked on his AMD Athlon X2 6000+, NVIDIA GeForce 8800GTS and there are others that have had it running on GeForce 8600GTS cards as well. And you were running 32-bit OS so it couldn't be that either...

It would be really weird if this problem is limited to FF8 and the Launcher alone. You haven't had any similar problems in other games? That would probably be an easier way to finding a fix as the userbase is most certainly larger.

I just realized celestria posted about a similar problem in the "FF8 Enhancing"-thread earlier. Not sure if it could make any difference but here are his posts quoted.
found a bug here for ya for some reason it runs jumpy (puttering?) on my system i have a amd 3800+ running at 2.5 with 2gb platinum ocz xtc ram on a evga 7600 (forceware 169.06) and windows xp sp2
just wondering if anybody else is havening this problem?
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its like stop and go motion could it be the drivers im useing? also on a 2nd note my anti aliasing is set to application controlled (sorry forgot to turn compatibility mode to win98.....) thank you for the patch no one would release^^ you are a hero!@
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Win 98 compability mode apparently fixed the issues he/she were having. I have no idea as to why; might be something with AMD processors that I'm unfamiliar with.
 
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I must say that my hat is off to you sir!  The time you must have spent programming this is unimaginable.  I have never been able to get FF8 to run on my laptop with a quadro 1400fx go in it.  It now runs perfectly.  I have to do some fine tuning with "ctrl .and," but this is simply amazing.  I just wanted you to know that I am very grateful that I can now run this game on my "modern" computer.  I want you to know that at least for this one person all of your hard work has paid off.  Thank you again.
 
Thanks alot for that =]

Spent all day trying to find a fix or a patch to fix the "black screen of death" that comes up when you run FFVIII with vista, and i couldn't find a single thing till my boyfriend linked me to this page :)

Just going to list my specs so everyone knows what its compatible with:

Dell Inspiron 1520
32bit Vista Home Basic
Intel Core 2 Duo T7100 1.8ghz
2gb memory
Sigmatel High Def Audio
nVidia GeForce 8600M GT (BTW, I didn't have to put the patch on)

This launcher is absolutely pimping :D  :mrgreen:

At first the FMVs were upside down, but i just uninstalled ff8 and re installed, and re did the steps , and it went fine after that.

If anyone has any questions at all, feel free to ask

Thanks alot for the launcher


PS: To the person who made the launcher, is this a late Xmas present  :lol:

And a happy new year to all  :-P
 
I'm glad the patch works for both of you guys! It nice to know that it's appreciated! :D
 
Had to register and reply for this.

Simply put .. AWESOME
Been waiting for years for this.

The only other option for FF8 on the pc (with new hardware) was a playstation emulator.
You have no idea how many souls you've saved with this tool :)

Hope I can get it to work on my 1366x768 display (damned HD ready sigh).

--edit

Unfortunately 1366x768 can't be used (obviously) , hope it'll get on the list.
Perhaps you can modify the tool to fetch the resolutions directly from windows ?
It's the way most games do it, will save you some time from adding every resolution people need as well.
Unsure on how hard it is though, no coder here :)
 
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Great, 1.3 worked with my HDTV resolution. 16xs & 16AF worked as well. Haven`t tried it on Vista 64-bit yet (as the bloody thing stopped working...).

Just one request though; right now I have black bars on the side, which seems awfully claustrophobic to me :). Could you perhaps make it so that we have the option to stretch it or not?
 
Have to toss in my applause, the launcher is great. It's good to see FF8 getting some love, too. I wish there were more tools available to tweak it as we have with FF7.
 
Here's a new version of the launcher (v1.31):
http://rapidshare.com/files/80132624/ff8_launcher_v1.31.rar

[ Version 1.31 ]
- New option "Stretch 4:3 Aspect Ratio" stretches the picture to the full screen width and height without maintaining original 4:3 picture aspect ratio. OPTION ONLY APPLIES TO NON-4:3 RESOLUTIONS.
- Added 1366x768 custom resolution.
- Fixed UV-map Compensation bug that made it impossible to remove all line-artifacts in background textures (very noticeable in wide-screen resolutions.)
- Fixed bug where the entire Black Borders Flicker Fix was not included in the release build of version 1.3 as intended.


I found some bugs in the last release of the launcher (version 1.3) as seen in the patch notes above. The uv-map compensation one actually had quite a bit effect on the background textures with lots of line-artifacts all over the screen that appeared and disappeared as you moved around. I’m surprised no one has made any comments about this. Anyway it should be fixed in this release and background textures be completely ridden of line-artifacts.

Also ran the readme.txt through a spellcheck (I really can't seem to spell some words correctly huh..? :) ) and changed my made up terms x32 and anisotopic filtering to x86 and anisotropic filtering respectively.


The new "Stretch 4:3 Aspect Ratio" option should do what you were asking for Kinseek. It won't remove the black bars put there by FF8 itself as to keep the entirety of the picture from the original but it will stretch the image in both directions to fit the current resolution and hence mess up the proportions (like on tv).

I have added the 1366x768 resolution to the launcher so give me a shout if it does not work for you Maf. I could modify it to do a check for possible resolution settings on the computer but originally refrained from doing so due to expecting different resolutions to need different values for different settings  (like with the uv-map compensation except I ended up making it user configurable due to it depending on external factors like FSAA).

Speaking of FSAA; I originally had the thought to include it as a setting in the launcher as given away by the UI. It has since become apparent that the Direct3D interfaces being used in FF8 do not support setting any specific settings (from what I can tell there’s only one). I might look into it more at a later point but more likely than not I will just remove that option in an upcoming version or leave it like it is currently as a reminder that it will actually use the global setting.
 
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This is amazing :-) well done on creating it and thanks a bunch! Glad to see FF8 getting some tweaks for once! Just one problem. It doesn't stretch for me. I'm not sure why. I've tried lots of the resolutions but none seem to stretch. My resolution is 1680x1050. If you can help me that would be great!

Thanks, Mattie.  :-)
 
This is amazing :-) well done on creating it and thanks a bunch! Glad to see FF8 getting some tweaks for once! Just one problem. It doesn't stretch for me. I'm not sure why. I've tried lots of the resolutions but none seem to stretch. My resolution is 1680x1050. If you can help me that would be great!

Thanks, Mattie.  :-)
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Make sure you use the 1.31 version of the launcher and have checked the "Stretch 4:3 Aspect Ratio" option. Otherwise it will pad the screen with black borders to maintain 4:3 aspect ratio (so that everything has the right proportions).

This works for me in 1680x1050 on Windows XP SP2. I have yet to test it on Vista but it should work the exact same way.
 
1366x768 working great , thanks again  :mrgreen:

-edit

Also like to add that I couldn't get picture perfect with 1.2 normal.
I had to use the 1.2geforce patch to get 100% perfect.

Another issue (unsure if it's related to the launcher) , is that the game gets slower after a while.
As well as a minor soundmod issue with the battle song (something sounds off in it).
 
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I definitely have the 1.31 version and have checked the "Stretch 4:3 Aspect Ratio" but it still isn't stretching :/ Maybe I'm doing something wrong. I am running it on Vista. Hmmm :/

Thanks, Mattie.
 
The new "Stretch 4:3 Aspect Ratio" option should do what you were asking for Kinseek. It won't remove the black bars put there by FF8 itself as to keep the entirety of the picture from the original but it will stretch the image in both directions to fit the current resolution and hence mess up the proportions (like on tv).
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Excellent, worked perfectly as well. I would have tested it on Vista 64 if I could, but its not been working and I don`t think I`ll mess with that until SP1.

So there is no way to stretch it horizontally just a tad more to remove the black bars on the top and bottom? That would improve the aspect ratio somewhat as well.
 
Hi is there anyway to manipulate the music? Like FF7music lets you assign MP3s to replace midi tracks?
 
Maf:
GeForce patch is probably required for all GeForce cards. It’s possible that the launcher somehow impact the performance of the game over time but unless you see it using up more memory than normal after awhile it is more likely to be caused by the original game.

The launcher does not hook any sound or music interfaces or make any changes to the ff8 assembly apart from rewriting parts of the import address table so I don't see how it could possibly have any effect like like what you mention.


Mattie:
I’ve now tested the patch on Vista and the stretching works fine for me.

What resolution are you trying to use? Is it the native resolution of your monitor? If not and your monitor is a LCD you should check the flat panel scaling option to make sure that it scales non-native resolutions instead of pixel-mapping them. On Nvidia GPU’s this is done in “NVIDIA Control Panel” -> Display -> “Change flat panel scaling”, make sure it’s set to Use NVIDIA scaling.

Are you using Vista 32bit or 64bit?


Kinseek:
I’m not sure if it’s a good idea to remove those black bars. They are present in the original game and I would have to assume it’s for a reason.

I know for sure that movies use up the full screen including the space that those black bars occupy. In video-sequences where the characters move over the video surface it could possibly lead to some unwanted side-effects but I’m not sure. I could take a look at it later on.


The Skillster:
Yes it should be possible but it's likely that you'd have to make changes to the assembly for something like that to work. The same thing goes for other resources like textures; I can replace them using the DirectX hooks used in the launcher but I have no way of knowing what texture is what as they are not loaded through DirectX but rather copied into a surface created using DirectX.

One of the great things about the launcher in its present form is that it is independent on what version or patches you have applied to the ff8.exe as it makes no actual changes to the game code.

Either way it’s not a project that I’m likely to undertake, at least not anytime soon. I have another month off until I’m going into military service so time’s running out. I’ll make sure to release the source code of the launcher under GPL before then for anyone who wishes to make changes or continue development.


Anyway, I wish you all a Happy New Year!
 
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Thanks for the reply. I've managed to get it working. I just deleted the files and tried it again and it worked! Thanks for your help :-)

Thanks, Mattie.

Happy New Year Everyone :-D
 
Hi is there anyway to manipulate the music? Like FF7music lets you assign MP3s to replace midi tracks?
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Probably one of the main reasons I found this forum was through Qhimm's mainsite (http://www.qhimm.com/), and also the soundfonts and patches that were found at http://ffsf.cjb.net/

The soundfont site is really good, it helps to have soundblaster live, but there are plenty of options out there.
 :mrgreen:
 
The newest Version dosent work for me. it open a message like "The Application Config are corrupt. Please reinstall..."
 
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