Original Final Fantasy VIII for PC

[hunterjwizzard]

I had a hankering to finally finish FF8 for the PC(game I started 23 years ago) using my vintage Pentium II laptop. My original game disks are scratched all to hell but I managed to pull clean rips of them. The disks flat out won't work for playing the game anymore(which is 70% of why I never finished playing it 23 years ago).

My attempts to find a solution are badly hampered by some stupid "remaster" that came out recently. No matter what I search, all I get are ancient forum posts with dead links or modern stuff about the stupid remaster. Anyone got any ideas on how to make this game work?

 

[segaloco]

How have you tried using the rips, a virtual drive, burned to CD-R, both? Also were they ISO rips or something higher fidelity like BIN/CUE?

 

[hunterjwizzard]

ISO rips mounted to a virtual drive.

Is there any reason to believe a burned copy would work better? I have disk1 mounted but the program insists its not there.

 

[hunterjwizzard]

Turns out the answer was deplorably simple. By default, the game hard-codes into the system registry that its looking for the disk in the D:\ drive.

I feel bad for anyone who bought it back in the day and had dual CDrom drives or a second HDD.


So seems to work for now. Next I have to find a savegame editor and I'll be all set to go.

 

[hunterjwizzard]

The game ended up effectively not being playable on the laptop. Which is kind of weird. The original Playstation was basically a 486. The PC port of the game only needed 233mhz(laptop was 300), and I recall playing this game flawlessly on a stupid 433mhz celleron with only 32mb of RAM back in the day. Ah well. Loading it up up an XP-era laptop.

 

[commodorejohn]

The Playstation had a MIPS R3k CPU running at 33 MHz, which had considerably more horsepower than a similarly-clocked 486, and a matrix-math coprocessor and dedicated GPU on top of that. A Pentium II system should still beat it out, but not as handily as all that - plus, PC ports of Playstation games were frequently an afterthought, and I doubt there was much effort put into optimizing it.