Proof that the PC Version looks 2 times as bad as it should:
Videos.
Have you ever noticed that the videos in the game are very pixelatic? Now, go to your Final Fantasy 7 directory and into the movies folder. Open any of these files with Windows Media Player 9 and go to Fullscreen (alt + enter). The video(s) should play and they look considerably better! Take a look at the girl in the beginning for example: she looks much rounder and most of the pixel garbage is gone! The new filters applied to the videos improve the image quality greatly. No editing of the files themselves is necessary, the player does it automatically.
Ingame.
Go into the game and take a look at the backgrounds. Just looking at the train in the beginning of the game once you have control of the character and you'll see immediately what the problem is: the backgrounds are 320*240! Now, enable "Anisotropic Filtering" in the display options of your graphics card. There will be a lot of corruption in the game in the form of boxes, but look at the train itself again. It looks fantastic! The filtering makes the backgrounds look like they are of a much higher resolution than they really are.
I was much impressed with the efforts of FF fans editing this game (the end result, an Ultima edition, is especially nice). There was an editing forum I came across a while ago (does anyone have a link of that by the way? It has a lot of FF7 modding discussion going on.)
I just wonder if there is anything you can do about this stuff, especially the resolution of the video. From my logic, it should be possible to take the videos, run them through a program like VirtualDub (doesn't support the file type, however) and take the better looking end result, replacing the old files in the folder. Or somehow change the default ingame video player.
I'm also looking into the box stuff with Anisotropic Filtering (and Anti-Aliasing), although fixing that should be much more difficult.
