Final Fantasy VII PC (1998 Release) - 8-bit MIDI Sound Font
12I've finally finished Final Fantasy VII on my PS2. I understand why it's a classic, but didn't actually think much of it. However, I did enjoy the music quite a bit.
With old games like this, I always tend to go through every version or port released, simply because I enjoy seeing the differences between them. And I've read that people usually hate the early PC port of Final Fantasy VII just because "MIDI sounds like ass"... Well, let me tell you, this people just don't know a thing about MIDI playback XD.
But in fact, neither do I, but a bit of research led me to finding how amazing MIDI can sound, with the right tools. I know that, in the past, special hardware was needed to get those tunes just right, and they could be either great, or actually sound like ass, depending on how much one were willing to spend. And as time went on, the way that Microsoft decided to support this format was through their own software, but with a really crappy sound font that could lead anyone to believe that MIDI always sucked. But today, one could simply download a simple software to emulate practically any MIDI hardware, and also have completely new sounds, thanks to the amazing people that create so many different tunes and stuff, just out of love for this format, really.
That said, I got CoolSoft VirtualMIDISynth working with this great 8-bit NES styled sound font and got Final Fantasy VII to rock its amazing music in those tunes XD. Since this sound font doesn't have all the instruments the music playback might require, some of the music might sound "wrong", but others sound really good, like the world map theme.
I can see myself beating this game all over again listening to the music however I want to. It's just amazing how the whole repertoire of the PSX version was recreated using the MIDI format, and not only once, it seems, because there are at least three "types" of MIDI playback you could choose from in the config menu. I used the Yamaha XG MIDI format here, because it sounds "fuller" than the General MIDI one. And this 8-bit sound font is just the first one I found on google, and seems to be credited to "The Eight Bit". But of course, there's hundreds, or probably thousands of other sound fonts out there, one of the most famous being "Timbres of Heaven", which does sound great with FF VII, but maybe a bit too loud with some instruments. I might upload other videos with different sound fonts, just for fun.
Regarding this PC version of FF VII, I think people simply hate it because of the music. Graphics wise, I think it's definitely an improvement over the original PSX version, with it's better looking GUI elements at 480p, and I think slightly better 3D models, which are natively "PGXPfied". Backgrounds are still 320x224, but those aren't as compressed as the Resident Evil games backgrounds, I think. The game does only support a maximum resolution of 640x480 out of the box however, but my CRT monitor just makes everything great (I have to appreciate this thing as much as I can right now, because it's already giving signs of imminent failure, which is just sad...). But of course, modding can "fix" all of that with ease, it's just a matter of preference.
Last bit of information: it was quite a hassle to get this game to work. I'm still using Windows 8.1, and for some reason, FMVs didn't want to play. But I managed to find some old Windows Media Player codec that did the job. There's also this amazing Direct Draw .dll (that I already mentioned in my Quake video) that does wonders on making old games run, also making this game run much smoother, so I'll link it bellow. On recording, the game only showed a black screen if FRAPS was in the background while launching, so I couldn't capture the "Eidos" FMV because of that. Had to run FRAPS after the game was already running, and also only at 640x480.
CoolSoft VirtualMIDISynth:
https://coolsoft.altervista.org/en/virtualmidisynth
8-bit Sound Font, by "The Eight Bit":
https://musical-artifacts.com/artifacts/23
DDrawCompat .dll, for making old games run better, by "narzoul":
https://github.com/narzoul/DDrawCompat
Other Videos By TheDimensioner
Other Statistics
Final Fantasy VII Statistics For TheDimensioner
At present, TheDimensioner has 1,476 views spread across 2 videos for Final Fantasy VII, with his channel publishing less than an hour of Final Fantasy VII content. This makes up 9.52% of the content that TheDimensioner has uploaded to YouTube.