I have three games I want to play on my current pc, which is running windows XP:

*Final Fantasy VII PC
*Final Fantasy VIII PC
and * American McGee's Alice

All of which are designed for running on a 95/98 OS.

Now, as you probably know (if you're reading this), FF7 on pc has massive incompatibility issues. FF8's a little better. Alice, ...depends.

If you're Not familiar with any of these games, you probably can't help me..but if you DO know about getting them to work, my question is this:

Since I'm rebuilding my pc anyway (I'd probably just transplant the current hard-drive w OS) and I don't need to worry about running Modern games so much, should I just:

1)buy an older video-card that's compatible with all three games (and if so, which one?) (Geforce, Nvidia...?)

2)maybe use an alternate hard-drive with windows 95/98 on it....?

or..
3) get a Newer video-card with modern support (and in that case ..still., an ATI, or an NVidia...? ) and dl respective patches?

If you have anything to contribute on this, I'd appreciate it.

There are two options which prevent you going to these extremes.

One, run the programs in "Compatitbility mode". This involves going to the folder where you installed the games, right-clicking on the executable and going to "Properties". Then click the "compatibility" tab, then tick the box that says "Run this program in compatibility mode for:" and select the operating system.

Another option is to partition your current harddrive, make it only 2 gig (or so), and install Windows 98 SE or Windows ME on that. When booting, your computer will detect two OS's, and give you the option of which to boot to.

Either one of these should solve your issues!

The only thing you need to do to get FF7 for pc running on xp is to download the special patch, which you can find at: http://asia.cnet.com/downloads/pc/swinfo/0,39000587,39028647s,00.htm
Believe me, it works, cos i had to download it to get my copy to work =)

Hmm, well, either of those are great suggestions for the OS compatibility, but what about the video-card? Right now I have a Radeon VE, and it doesn't run anything particularly well. (and as I recall the updates don't help much) I was thinking of getting a Radeon 9800 or something (with more updated support) ... OR picking a video-card that any of those games were designed to run with, but I"m not sure which is a better idea, or which of the older cards is the best. Any suggestions for that? ( I need a new card one way or another. I just don't need to worry about playing anything else with it)


The only thing you need to do to get FF7 for pc running on xp is to download the special patch, which you can find at: http://asia.cnet.com/downloads/pc/swinfo/0,39000587,39028647s,00.htm
Believe me, it works, cos i had to download it to get my copy to work =)

sweet, thanks for the link :D

Compatibility mode should work fine. And I don't know the exact specs of the VE, but almost any graphics card should be able to handle FF7 + 8, they're ancient. (iirc, my 10+ year old P133Mhz with onboard graphics could run Alice) ;)

sweet, thanks for the link :D
No problem. By the way, my friend has got FF7 for pc and he got the patch from that link and the game still wont work for him, and he's got a much higher spec pc than i have, so i dunno whats wrong with it :-(

Compatibility mode should work fine. And I don't know the exact specs of the VE, but almost any graphics card should be able to handle FF7 + 8, they're ancient. (iirc, my 10+ year old P133Mhz with onboard graphics could run Alice) ;)

yeah.. "Should" is right. ... I am Not technically minded like some people. (that's why I'm scouring user-forums like this) but it seems like, according to the various bits of info I've collected over this issue, that FF7 and 8 pc were designed to run on a few cards in particular, and anything else wouldn't have full support. (Like when I first got it, I ran a Banshee (Voodoo 2), on windows 95, but the only rendering option it supported was "8-bit palette texturing" ha.)

And they released various patches for various cards- some being more successfull than others. 'n now everything's really hard to track down because it's old and they don't offer support for it anymore. But some people still have problems with the XP patch (because, of course, the game wasn't intended for it)

I could buy a New video-card, with modern tech support, and assuming that the *latest* direct-x drivers aren't any worse than the drivers the game was made for, that should solve my problem. (for about 100-150$)

so, why not buy a card that's older AND made for the game, cheaper?

(Alice isn't nearly so picky in this respect, though. I tried switching the OS compatibility but it still has flickering console displays so I can never tell how much health or "magic" I have.) (to be precise, the health, weapon, and magic meter all flicker simultaneously in the center of the screen whenever it's most inconvenient (like when I'm being attacked. Otherwise they're invisible). I think this is a direct-x problem...

get a new card and download the patches