Poll of the Day > could n64 have handled final fantasy 7

(+) Yeah! (+)

just wondering

on 10 cartridges maybe

Not in its entirety, no. Solid state chips just weren't going to hold all that info back then, at any kind of reasonable price.

If storage weren't an issue, sure. It's more than technologically competent enough for low res background scenes and shitty gouraud shaded polygon characters.

No.
Distill the huge overlap between the three CDs, and it's still vastly over the maximum capacity of a n64 cart by an order of magnitude and some change.

the system could, but the cartridges couldn't
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dragon504 posted...

the system could, but the cartridges couldn't

Well, yeah.

FF7 could have been done on Colecovision, were cart-space not a concern.

dragon504 posted...

the system could, but the cartridges couldn't

This.

Square actually wanted to port FF7 to the N64, but their own analysis indicated the carts simply couldn't handle it. Of note, certain PS1 games did wind up getting ported to the N64 (Resident Evil 2, for instance), since the system was generally powerful enough to handle anything the PS1 could (aside from cutscenes). The issue was that the N64's cartridges couldn't hold as much data as the PS1's discs (to say nothing of games like FF7 that were stored on multiple discs).

Questionmarktarius posted...

FF7 could have been done on Colecovision, were cart-space not a concern.

....erm... no, not really, no.

That's sort of like saying that I could run Skyrim on my 1992 PC as long as the hard drive was big enough.
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darkknight109 posted...

....erm... no, not really, no.

It could?
Eliminate the movies, cut out the 3d everything, and it could have. Colecovison was a way better system than anyone remembers.
The only real catch is that the text may not have fit on a colecovison cart. Long-ints for materia finally cloning may have been an issue, but a competent programmer could fudge it

Questionmarktarius posted...

Eliminate the movies, cut out the 3d everything, and it could have.

In other words completely redo the game.

Yes, if you did that, then it becomes a lot more feasible. But then it's not really a port anymore...
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Questionmarktarius posted...

It could?
Eliminate the movies, cut out the 3d everything, and it could have.

By that standard, a printer could "play" FFVII with enough paper.
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Kyuubi4269 posted...

Questionmarktarius posted...

It could?
Eliminate the movies, cut out the 3d everything, and it could have.

By that standard, a printer could "play" FFVII with enough paper.

Think about this, for a little bit.
What did FF7 do that NES could not?

Over the past sixty years of video games, they've mostly gotten prettier.
https://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/200810/physicshistory.cfm

Questionmarktarius posted...

Kyuubi4269 posted...

Questionmarktarius posted...

It could?
Eliminate the movies, cut out the 3d everything, and it could have.

By that standard, a printer could "play" FFVII with enough paper.

Think about this, for a little bit.
What did FF7 do that NES could not?

Over the past sixty years of video games, they've mostly gotten prettier.
https://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/200810/physicshistory.cfm

Are you really saying looks don't matter in a visual medium? This, of course, ignoring that PS1 improved sound.
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Kyuubi4269 posted...

This, of course, ignoring that PS1 improved sound.

Didn't PS1 have essentially the same sound chip as SNES, but with more channels?

minervo posted...

on 10 cartridges maybe

What if we sold it to you cartridge by cartridge in episodic chunks?
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The N64 did have some good compressing ratio if they really wanted to.
Resident Evil 2 on PS1 was on 2 discs and the N64 version had the full game with more items, running at a higher resolution and using higher quality audio. The downside was that the FMVs were more compressed, but the difference was not that huge.

That said, Final Fantasy VII had too many pre-rendered backgrounds and FMVs to make it possible, even if they compressed the hell out of them.
But if they rendered the maps with the game engine, think like the world map, and made most movies in the game engine, then it is theoretically possible that we could have got pretty much the same game as the PS1 version.

So the question is, do you mean a 1:1 copy from the PS1 version? No.
Or do you mean with graphical changes that still delivered the same story and gameplay? Possible yes.