Playing FF7 (PC) in WinXP with GeForce 5200... glitch - is there a fix?

Hey there,
I just installed FF7 on my Dell 2350. I'm using WinXP Home and Nvidia Geforce FX 5200 PCI.
I've applied the WinXP patch.

The games work fine for the most part. However the movies are very grainy.... I have DX9.0a and the DirectShow software included with the FF7 installed. That is not my biggest problem. The main problem I have is that there is a black bar at the bottom of the screen when the movies are played and during actual gameplay... but there is no black bar there when the big blue menu pops up after you win a battle.

I've included a pic below of the game playing the the black bar at the bottom.
http://www.bellsouthpwp.net/s/h/shad...Misc/FF7pc.jpg

Any ideas?

By the way - I noticed that I can actually walk under the the area where the black bar is.

THIS patch, also hosted on EoFF, should fix it.

Quote:

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Originally posted by Citizen Bleys in the news on the main page of the site
The Riva TnT patch for Final Fantasy VII PC version has been added to the FF7 section of the site, as well as the GeForce and non-GeForce versions of the bug fix patch for Final Fantasy VIII.

People wishing to play FF7PC with later nVidia video cards such as a TnT2 or any of the GeForce series should use the patch that's been added to the FF7 section.

Both patches are located on the left-hand navigation pane.

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Purgatory,
Thanks for your fast reply! :-)
I'll use that patch and see it it helps.

Thanks again for your help.

Just tried that patch... and it helped displayed the movies better but the black bar problem still exist.
Also, when I check Nvidia and select either Rivia 128 or TNT my screen go black and then flickers back to my desktop.

I'm afraid I can't help you then. I really know next to nothing about this kinda stuff so mweh...

I'll move it to the Help Forum though, where you should get some better advice =D?

I had FF7 installed on my computer for a day so I could help Strider with his problems in the game. But I also had many problems with it. Eventhough I have a very good graphics card (GeForce4 Ti 4200), the graphics were absolutly horrid. When I installed the game, it even told me that my graphics card might not be able to handle the "AWESOME GRAPHICS DISPLAY" that FF7 PC verion has!

I don't really have any advice though, sorry. I un-installed it right after I helped him.

The Black Bar problem is due to FF7 using different screen resolutions or sizes with different height/width ratios for different parts of the game. It's certainly more noticable in the PSX version on a PSX emulator, you can see that the menu screen is wider than normal gameplay screens so you get bars on both top and bottom if the emulator's video plugin doesn't resize automatically for you :p So yeah, not much you can do about it really for the PC version as far as I know :p

Ahh, that makes sense.

Thanks for the information - I really appreciate it.