It's me again. Sorry.

Whenever there's talk of a DS-port of Final Fantasy VII, sooner or later people will start talking about whether or not they could fit the game on one of them DS cards, agree that they couldn't, and start talking about making larger cards or employing a system of card swapping.
Also, whenever this happens, nobody actually does the research and the calculations. So I did. And these are the facts:

The largest available regular DS cartridge is the 2 gigabit card, which as we all should know by now is 256 Megabytes. Flashcards hold 2GB and more, but for some reason Nintendo decides not to use cards that hold that much space. A PlayStation CD holds about 600MB, and Final Fantasy VII had three of them. So no way the game could fit onto a 256 card, right?

Wrong. First, let's take a look at the DS specs in comparison to the PSX:

1.  The PSX has a 33mhz CPU, the DS has 67mhz. This isn't all that important and the DS is not "twice as fast" as the PSX, because what matters is the GPU and the 3D rendering capabilities.
2. The PSX has a relatively powerful, easy to program GPU with a maximum of 180.000 texture-mapped and light-sourced polygones, and it has 2MB RAM
3. The DS can put out a maximum of 120.000 such polygons, but has a more powerful 2D GPU and 4MB of RAM.
4.  The PS1 has video memory of 1MB, the DS has 656KB.

1. BACKGROUNDS

2. MUSIC

3. FULL-MOTION-VIDEO

4. GAME DATA

flash cart go up to 8GB now a day, dont remember how that one was called.
Also Nintendo has being cranking out bigger games for the DS
Neon Genesis Evangelion Ayanami Ikusei Keikaku DS with Asuka, this one to be precise, the first 2048Mbit rom.

Sounds brilliant. How long did it take you to work all this out?

"Sounds brilliant. How long did it take you to work all this out?"

"atejas said:

"Sounds brilliant. How long did it take you to work all this out?"

till square wont have anymore monony to make other games"

hmmm actually final fantasy 7 could all ways fit on a cartridge the space of ff7 was all ways taken up by CGI it was never taken up by actual game content.

Also Nintendo has being cranking out bigger games for the DS
Neon Genesis Evangelion Ayanami Ikusei Keikaku DS with Asuka, this one to be precise, the first 2048Mbit rom.

Sounds brilliant. How long did it take you to work all this out?

Wow nice calculations, I'd love to see a DS port, BUT an actual remake with the current consoles would be even more awesome.

"Endogene said:

Also Nintendo has being cranking out bigger games for the DS
Neon Genesis Evangelion Ayanami Ikusei Keikaku DS with Asuka, this one to be precise, the first 2048Mbit rom.

Yes, 2048Mbit. This is one of the regular "2Gbit" cards I was talking about. And the first one wasn't this, it was ASH.

"Wow nice calculations, I'd love to see a DS port, BUT an actual remake with the current consoles would be even more awesome."

"hmmm actually final fantasy 7 could all ways fit on a cartridge the space of ff7 was all ways taken up by CGI it was never taken up by actual game content."

I'd love to see a DS port, BUT an actual remake with the current consoles would be even more awesome.

"

Why not just play it on the Ps1/Ps2/PS3 (if your a lucky one)?
Or the psp....

"

Just my personal prediction: I see the FFVII remake/port happening in a few years for sure. I imagine they are going on some line of remaking the games with III and now IV on the DS. I think V will be next, then VI to go along with it and eventually it will be time for VII. That is just me wishfully thinking though.

"I do disagree though, I think a VII remake would be fine, anything that was done then could be done now. I am not sure how the game would be dumbed down with voice overs, how does that work exactly? "

I think Zenaxzd is right in it coming eventually, Square are making enough of a profit from the III and IV remakes to continue the trend. Nicely worked out Meowayne!

Yeah, Tetsuya still has to roll out FFXIII.

"Zenaxzd said:

"I do disagree though, I think a VII remake would be fine, anything that was done then could be done now. I am not sure how the game would be dumbed down with voice overs, how does that work exactly? "

My guess is that some of the voice actors would not be as good as they could be. Kinda like you never expected a character's voice to be a certain way. I think they could do a good job though, Crisis Core's voice actors were good in my opinion. "

Just to complete things, a gameplay-vid running on the DS. I recorded it myself via ePSXe to ensure it had the highest image quality possible, but of course you can't really see it because of the bad camera (can't seem to get proper focus on small LCD screens) and the loss of quality by uploading on youtube. It's also much darker than it looked like on the camera. Anyway, here you go.

if that video did not convince the nay-sayers i dont know what would

Wow, that is very cool Meowayne. Sending that video to Square-Enix? :P

Note that this still isn't full-screen. So the actual resolution would be even higher.

Whew, alright listen, for those interested in this kind of stuff: Unsatisfied with googling and repeating what other people claim, I mounted the PSX Final Fantasy VII CD images with Daemon Tools and did my own research, digging into the innards of the games files. This produced some interesting things.

Above I stated that some of the background, movie, music etc. files are repeated on the three game discs, taking up unnecessary files.

This proved to be not entirely true.

Everything is repeated on the three discs. Absolutely everything: With the exception of the movie files, the three Final Fantasy VII discs are identical.

That's right. The entire game of Final Fantasy VII is 243mb in size, and Squaresoft didn't bother to use only the stuff needed on each seperate disc, they just put the entire game on each disc and filled up the remaining 400mb with full motion video. Every background image, every enemy model, every piece of dialogue can be found on each of the three discs. They could have released this easily on the N64 if it weren't for the movie files. Brilliant!

So I took a look at what else is there. I guessed that the music files could not use more than 5-10mb. I was a little off. Final Fantasy VII's entire soundtrack is only 824kb.

Then there's the 3D data. The enemies (11mb), magic spells, effects and character models (45mb), battle stages (14mb) and the world map (30mb), all in all a mere 100mb. A DS version would use slightly smaller textures, maybe a bit less polygons and simplified effects, and better compression. This stuff would be at least 30% smaller. 70mb.

Field-Data is the most interesting. It's a big folder and basically contains all the story related stuff: Backgrounds, background depth information, events, and all of the dialogue.

For every scene, there's the background image (.mim), the respective depth information so the game knows whats in front and what's behind of the 3D character (.bsx) and all the dialoge that happens there (.dat)

The 787 different .mim files = 110mb
the .bsx files = 20mb
the .dat files = 10mb

As explained above, the background image data can be more than halved in size. The .bsx and .dat files probably can't, making a DS-Version of this stuff approx. 75MB in size.

What I said about the movies remains the same. 75MB.

And finally there are about 6mb of game code.

Now we have some definitive numbers to work with! What space is needed in order to put this entire game onto a DS card?

movies (75mb)
+ field-data (75mb)
+ 3D-data (70mb)
+ game code and music (7mb)
---------------------------
= 227 MB


Maximum size for a DS game nowadays: 256 MB. Now I don't know what additional data is required to put this on the DS, but I dare say Square should be able to handle this.

"WilliamRLBaker said:

"hmmm actually final fantasy 7 could all ways fit on a cartridge the space of ff7 was all ways taken up by CGI it was never taken up by actual game content."

Well read the post carefully. The opposite is the case: CGI and image data becomes relatively small when put into DS resolution and compressed with modern techniques - It is the game data that remains the largest of the packages. If the game data and coding cannot be compressed, it poses as much of a problem as the CGI stuff does.

I'd love to see a DS port, BUT an actual remake with the current consoles would be even more awesome.

Yeah, the old argument.. I disagree. The game is too heavy of semi-interactive dialogue-sequences and draws much of its appeal from a certain weirdness and it's nippon-style. Voiceovers would require the game to be dumbed down and littered with cutscenes, and a graphic overhaul would require many changes in gameplay as well. Just like Ocarina of Time, people who have not played it in it's time rarely enjoy it. I say an attempt at recreating the game to appeal to modern audiences is a futile attempt, especially in the hands of the fanservice whores at SquareEnix. Final Fantasy VII is a 90s game and I don't think it would work any other way.
Now they already did milk the franchise with many mediocre games, and I wouldn't care anymore if there were a PS3 remake or not. As long as there will also be an unchanged DS-port. :D

Chances of that happening? I'd estimate 20%. There will undoubtedly be a rerelease or remake of the game in some form or another, but I can't see Squeenix releasing the post-SNES games on the DS. : (
"

It wont be re released, at least not on a Nintendo console, i forget the details but theres a reason why none of the main series is on a Nintendo, just the crystal chronicles shite.
Also, i have the OST for VII, the tracks are the same size as any song, ranging from 1-6MB or thereabouts.

"It wont be re released, at least not on a Nintendo console, i forget the details but theres a reason why none of the main series is on a Nintendo, just the crystal chronicles shite.
Also, i have the OST for VII, the tracks are the same size as any song, ranging from 1-6MB or thereabouts.
"

"brukaoru said:

"Zenaxzd said:

"I do disagree though, I think a VII remake would be fine, anything that was done then could be done now. I am not sure how the game would be dumbed down with voice overs, how does that work exactly? "

My guess is that some of the voice actors would not be as good as they could be. Kinda like you never expected a character's voice to be a certain way. I think they could do a good job though, Crisis Core's voice actors were good in my opinion. "

Yeah, but he said dumbed down, correct me if I am wrong here by all means but I thought dumbed down meant simplifying something. I don't get how voiceovers would do that.  I do agree quite a bit though! I found Crisis Core's voice acting to be top notch, I was especially happy with how well they pulled off Cloud, he did sound more like a kid as he was supposed to be in CC. "

"I had actually ment it in the n64 cartridge i should have specified that sorry ff7 would have fit on a large n64 cartridge if the CGI was removed."

"It wont be re released, at least not on a Nintendo console, i forget the details but theres a reason why none of the main series is on a Nintendo, just the crystal chronicles shite.
Also, i have the OST for VII, the tracks are the same size as any song, ranging from 1-6MB or thereabouts.
"

Yeah there's more issues than just space, like the issue that this game sucks if you don't have nostalgia for it. I really wanted to play it, and when I finally got my hands on a copy, I realized that the game has not aged well, at all. I'm sure the story's awesome, but it needs to be upgraded to modern consoles, not ported.

Please take any fanboyism someplace else. Before you all get worked up again on the quality of the game or the necessity of a port, I'd rather have this thread disappear again.

Honestly, if they did remake it, I'd expect they could improve the character models. Look at FF III and IV, they look better than FFVIII.

Sony published Final Fantasy VII, unlike the other Final Fantasy games. It probably won't happen.

"Sony published Final Fantasy VII, unlike the other Final Fantasy games. It probably won't happen."

If they are going to remake the game, they would do it full blown, on the PS3. They wouldn't just do some quick and dirty DS job.

Thats a deep look into both systems and the game, nice my friend, if this came out for the DS I would buy one right away, but this is highly doubtful : (

"Everything is repeated on the three discs. Absolutely everything: With the exception of the movie files, the three Final Fantasy VII discs are identical.

"Honestly, if they did remake it, I'd expect they could improve the character models. Look at FF III and IV, they look better than FFVIII.