Hey all, I just wanted to add my $.02 this topic. This is all based off my experience thus far playing this game and making it work with newer hardware. This is just a quick write up for things to do to get this game working crash free with a 6x00 series card and Windows XP. Note, I don't have a Radeon card to try these steps with, but I'm confident it should work the same way...
First off, let me second that you should NOT use the so called "Windows XP Patch" It helps with absolutely nothing as far as I can gather.
Now, install the game doing a FULL install not the minimum (I've found this will only cause more problems, besides the games old enough where even the full install shouldn't take up too much space on your HDD. Also, avoid installing the sound plugin (can't remember the name). This sound plugin made my game and computer unstable.
Once you've installed the game, apply the 1.02 Patch. Go into the FF7 Config. and Check the box next to NVIDIA and select TNT. Now Direct3D Hardware rendering will be enabled and your graphics adaptor will now render the images instead of your CPU.
Now, Download and install Rivatuner available at guru3d.com among other places (just google it
). Go into the Directdraw and Direct3D settings>Click the Textures tab, and disable or uncheck the "8-Bit palette textures" Note you can do this for both DX7 Apps, along with DX8.1+ Apps as well, I've found you only need to disable for DX7 apps.
*NOTE* It is not possible to get FSAA to work with the 6800 series cards (unless you're using the Hi-Res patch) I don't know if this applies to the 6600 series, but I would assume it does as well. So save yourself the hassle and DO NOT apply the changes to the .cfg file of rivatuner posted on the first page of this faq. It will create the grid-line effect if you do. I've tried several sets of drivers to find out for sure and they all failed at getting AA and this game to run without the gridline effect.
*NOTE* Speaking of trying several different sets of drivers, I've tested the 77.76 Driver set, the 71.84 Driver set, the 77.13 and the 72.12. Out of all of these. Only the 71.84 driver set fully got rid of the Gridline effect after disabling 8-bit palette textures and FSAA. One thing that bugs me about the 71.84's is that it seems to report the video card temperatures really high, even at idle it was saying the card was around 65C while any other driver set I used was reporting about 10-15C lower at idle.
Now, if you've followed these instructions and are using the 71.84 drivers, you should be Gridline free, but you might not be fully crash free. There are still 2 things you can do to prevent crashes in the future.
The first and more popular thing is to apply the Chocobo patch. You can download it from qhimm.com just do a search and you should find the patch, or you can look in the "Popular Programs" sticky to download that as well. I myself had to apply the Chocobo patch to stop the game from crashing whether just watching a chocobo race or racing in it myself, both times would crash. This patch totally resolved that issue.
The other tweak you can do, which helped me tremendously in a lot of cases was to pull the .avi (Movie files) off the CDROM and put them on your HDD. You than do a simple registry tweak to tell the game to not load the movies from the disk but the directory that you placed the copied .avi files to. The tutorial on how to do this is located at this link:
http://www.ff7-universe.com/ go to downloads, and at the very bottom you'll see the write up. Thanks to EmporerSteele for the write up
Doing this has resolved some movie crashes that I was having, and it also makes the play back of the movies a lot smoother.
If you're experiencing the "Upside down" movie problem, you can download the corresponding patch that's located on page one of this thread.
If you're still experiencing problems after doing all of the above steps. Create a thread here, and try to be as thorough as possible about what problems you are having. Example the subject line shouldn't say OMG!!!1 WTF!!! CRAsH!
It should say somthing like: "1.02Patch applied and 8-bit disabled still getting gridline effect". ect. ect.
The people on this forum are very intelligent (especially at getting this game to run properly
) Listen to what they have to say and you'll get through your problems just fine.
Sorry if this post is long-winded or if it didn't help you at all. I'm just trying to make it easier for people who have a similar setup as me and spare them hours of frustration.
My Apologies to anyone I didn't recognize through out this post, I take no credit for any of the patches/tweaks mentioned in this post. Thank you.
EDIT: I forgot to add a little segment about setting the Compatibility of the FF7.exe.
First, if you are unsure how to do this, click start>Programs>Final Fantasy VII. Locate the FF7.exe and Right-Click on it. select properties and a menu screen should appear. Click the Compatibility tab at the top and check the box that says: "Run this program in compatibility mode for..."
You now have a drop down menu available to select Windows 95, Windows 98/Me or Windows 2000. For me, Windows 98/Me seemed to get rid of any crashes that still seemed to occur. Although, I'm now running the Hi-Res Patch, and that seems to like the compatibility mode of Windows 95 instead of 98/Me. With 98/Me selected with the Hi-Res patch, the game would just suddenly crash about every 20 Minutes (in or out of battle).
Windows 2000 Compatibility mode did not work very well at all for me. So I suggest avoiding that one, but it may work for you, so as a last ditch effort if everything else fails try it.
EDIT #2: Hmm, what a coincidence. I was talking about how it seemed like Windows 95 Compatibility mode seemed to be more stable with the Hi-Res patch, but the game started crashing on Gaea's cliff. So I now have it set to Windows 98/Me compatibility mode and it has been crash free since...
