I've been trying feverishly to get The Godfather running on Windows 7 in light of the various problems that people have been having with it. My research has led me find that the problem is the same with Vista.

Now, I've been busy and tried my level best to try and fix this. The common knowledge solution has been to delete or rename the "movies" directory, which effectively denies the game any access to the video files. This works, but it also removes all the FMV cutscenes from the game. The solution has led me to believe that there is some kind of codec problem.

Tweaking the filelist.txt file and removing all references of the movie files from there does nothing, so apparently godfather.exe does not determine the filenames for the video files from that.

There are no dynamic video codec libraries in the game directory. Opening godfather.exe in a hex editor has revealed that the codec is STATICALLY LINKED (urgh!) with a reference to VP6_CODEC_INTERNAL.

I think the EXE has been compressed but I can't figure out which compressor was used, so I can't disassemble the file.

And this is where I'm stuck. I'd ideally like to be able to re-code the VP6 files into MP4 and get the game executable to use Windows' native MP4 decoder in place of its own internal codec (through hex-editing of course!), but I'm not sure if or how this is possible.

I'm not an expert programmer so I may be in over my head here, but if there are any developers/hackers out there who may be able to lend a hand, please do!