If the Rage Pro does not support paletted textures, you're out of luck.

Tried 1.02?

This thread suggests accelerated mode should work on the Rage Pro under 98SE (unlike Radeon).

yes Ive tried it on both the vanilla game, and with the 1.02 patch , no difference.

one thing Ive noticed is that when I tried the game with the latest drivers , it wouldn't even recognize hardware mode, reverting to older drivers at least solved that, just with the glitchy graphics and sound (as well as fixed other games like Tomb Raider's Rage 3D Patch , Quake , Hexen II etc)

as for the paletted textures, at least according to the config utility that tests the PC , it does pass the test, so in theory it should be ok , like I said, the Rage Pro is on the list of supported hardware.

Yeah it should work fine in theory, FF7 does not have a single bit of alpha blending a Rage will choke over, same deal with FF8.

I actually tried running the game in hardware mode, but in 320X240, which did solve the stuttering video and lack of sound , but the grid pattern was still there, and obviously at that res its not that different to software.

also when loading a save which starts at the world map , the sound is there even at 640X480, and the game runs great, but then , as soon as I go anywhere with a 2D background , the grid pattern appears again.

I may try the unofficial 1.4 patch to see if that makes any difference even on Win98, although it really should work , the card is specifically mentioned in the readme file as a card that should run the game in 640X480/hardware mode.

edit: damn , the patch is for WinXP only , so that idea is out.

Darkman wrote:

now, running it in software mode does solve those issues

Even the movies? I ran FF7 on a PII back in the day, and the movies would constantly lag far behind the sound (and overlaid 3D graphics, when applicable).

but the game box mentions the Rage Pro as a supported device, so it should work, Ive also tried different drivers, the newest and some older ones which function better with other games too.

Any ones in particular? Also, what version of DirectX do you have installed?

yes, this is a PII 400 after all , so its not too bad on the CPU speed front , I did think of putting in a 600Mhz Katmai in this , but the point of this system was to work well with early Win9X or DOS games , so a faster CPU might compromise that (I have the dual 800Mhz Coppermine machine for that)

it doesn't mention anything in particular, just the Rage Pro in general , its mentioned in the slip of paper which states which cards are compatible (the Voodoo/V2/Rush and Intel i740 are some of the others mentioned) , the readme file also states this

"For ATI RagePro users, please run in 640x480 Full or Quarter Screen
mode. These modes are faster than 320x240 Full Screen mode. A P233 or higher
is recommended for RagePro users playing under hardware mode."

now claiming a higher resolution is faster , is obviously an incorrect statement, but it does show the game is supported.

right now Im using DX8, I tried DX6 , but for whatever reason this causes a problem with Grim Fandango keeps on asking for DX6 to be installed...

I meant if you had tried any drivers in particular. I think the last ones for the Rage Pro used DirectX 8.1.

How much RAM do you have?

Also, do the movies on the CD work in Media Player? Maybe you don't have the right codecs installed. (Back in the day, updating Windows Media Player to the latest version helped a lot.)

By the way, there's definitely a replacement installer for Grim Fandango out there.

but the point of this system was to work well with early Win9X or DOS games , so a faster CPU might compromise that (I have the dual 800Mhz Coppermine machine for that)

So... Why not run FF7 there? Unless of course you enjoy wrestling with obscure technical problems such as this. 😉

just out of interest I tried various versions of DirectX to see if it makes any difference, I tried DX5 (the one on the disc) , DX6 , 6.1 , and DX7 , and sadly there was almost no difference, in fact with those it was worse as the movie seemed to be even choppier than with DX8 (along with the Grim Fandango problem I mentioned, and the issues it gave me with the Gravis Pad Im using).

yes I tried the newest drivers available too , but it was the same, as well as having issues on many other games (Tomb Raider's Rage patch not working for instance), using a somewhat older driver fixed that, with the exception of FF7, Ive tried the game with both 256Mb and 384Mb.

Grim works great if I run it with DX7 or 8 , its just with DX6 that this problem exists., does that replacement installer fix the issue the game has with dual processor/core or too fast CPUs? , if it does it might be worthwhile to install that on the faster machine.

Whoops, I was still editing when you replied. Please see above.

Darkman wrote:

does that replacement installer fix the issue the game has with dual processor/core or too fast CPUs? , if it does it might be worthwhile to install that on the faster machine.

There is an official LucasArts patch to fix the one part of the game that has an issue on fast PCs. I hear ResidualVM works pretty well these days too.

the reason I want to run it on this PC is for the AWE64G music the game supports, I personally prefer it to what it sounded like on PS1, and alot better than the default PC sounds most people were using. the other PC being focused more on Win9x/2k , has an SBLive on it.

like I said, eventually I will probably get a Voodoo1 or 2 which will probably solve the issue, but Im still surprised the Rage Pro is giving me such issues.

I actually had the Grim patch installed , but the game still gave me issues on dual CPUs it crashes very quickly

Ever thought it might be damage on the card, such as to the memory? If it happens in software mode, that's also a telling clue.

software mode looks fine actually, functions correctly though obviously the low res makes the game makes the game look even blockier than it is.

I have to wonder if it really is an incompatibility with this particular model of the Rage Pro, it is most certainly a Rage Pro though.

Did you get that part about installing the latest version of Media Player, or checking to see if the videos will play off the disc?

Perhaps the music isn't playing properly when the gameplay starts because something's wrong with the decompression codec. (It's a long shot.)

well I did copy the movies to the hard drive (as well as set the "movies" in the registry) and it no difference.
I will install the latest version of media player, sadly I didn't see it beforehand, if I remember correctly, the latest version available for WIn98SE is version 9 , so I will go for that and come back later to tell about any changes there may be.

sadly it hasn't affected anything, though Ive been thinking.

since the AWE64 option is basically a 4MB soundfont from what I can tell, would it work on any soundcard capable of loading custom soundfonts? if it does, it might be worth it to load the soundfont directly onto the SBLive in the other machine and select the general midi option , to see if it sounds the same

might be worth trying out sometime.

I have both an AWE64 Gold and an SB Live! installed in the same system. Despite the information you'll find to the contrary, the SoundFont support in Final Fantasy VII is compatible with both cards, without the need to either load the SoundFont bank(s) beforehand, or combine them, etc.

What you will need to do though is:
- Make sure the Creative/E-MU SoundFont Manager is installed and set as the default system MIDI device.
- Set "SB Live! Synth A" as the target device in the SoundFont MIDI Router settings.
- Select the "Game3D - Final Fantasy VII" Environmental Audio preset through the Creative AudioHQ panel. (Reverb will be applied to the wave-playback channels as well, unlike with the AWE64 - just turn it off for that source, if desired.)
- Configure Final Fantasy VII using the "SB Live! Synth A" and "SoundFont MIDI" selections.

That's it.

that did the trick , thank you. Although I think that eventually I will eventually try to separate the 2 machines in terms of OS, with the newer one running mainly or only Win2k ( just for the sake of less burden, almost all games I want to run on it can run great on Win2k)
the PII machine will be the main Win98SE machine , especially if I can get a Voodoo 2 for it (SLI would be nice, but not necessary), FF7 will probably go on that machine, it should also solve some of the speed issues the game has (the chocobo races and snowboard games for instance, are far too fast, even on an 800Mhz PIII)

speaking of the game presets though , are there any that work with Win2K? , Ive been trying to use the legacy game presets that came with the Win98 installation , but they can't be imported into Win2K (the drivers seem to demand .aup files, as opposed to .sea files) have any ever been made? or is there some way to convert them?

Darkman wrote:

well I did copy the movies to the hard drive (as well as set the "movies" in the registry) and it no difference.

I mean, if you double-click the movie files in Windows Explorer (or open them directly in Media Player), do they play correctly?

Darkman wrote:

the chocobo races and snowboard games for instance, are far too fast, even on an 800Mhz PIII

Gee, I wasn't aware of that.

One last thing: is your Rage Pro an AGP card? If so, do you have your motherboard drivers installed?