FF on XP SP3 & external drives

[Panther_Gunn]

So the laptop that I set up with XP SP1 just to run the original game doesn't have either enough RAM or enough video RAM to run the game at a playable speed.  Having a machine that is only good for CTool doesn't really make much sense.

I'm considering installing the first game on my current laptop, XP SP3, but I don't recall the specifics of what SP2 broke for the game, other than CTool.  I've got FFVTTR already installed, so I should be able to use that CTool for the old meshes.  Also, I'm running a little low on HD space, with only about 20 Gb left.  That's the size of the HD on my old laptop, and FF was taking up more than it's fair share of that, and I also haven't installed any of the extras for FFVTTR yet.

So here's my questions (other than what does SP2 break for the first game):  how well do either game deal with various assets residing on an external HD, connected to what should be a USB 2.0 port?  Is it possible to have both games share sound and art assets in a single location (like, say, voice packs & sound FX, as well as custom FX)?  I know that old meshes and sometimes keyframes need to be converted to work in FFVTTR, and that .dds skins work better as well, but is there anything else that can be shared that doesn't need to be converted?  What about maps?

Any tips or insight on compatibility, space-saving, and external assets would be helpful.

[stumpy]

Sadly, I can't say much about how the FF-related content-creation tools work under later versions of Windows XP. But, as far as I know, if you can get them installed, they run fine. And, the installation issues didn't crop up for most people until Vista.

As far as I know, XP SP3 should be able to run FF very well generally. Some people had trouble when ending Danger Room sessions to go back to the main menu - the game would crash. If I recall correctly, that was as much an issue with the patch that allowed the game to run better under SP2+ than with the service pack itself. Net result: Still very playable, but some inconvenience (the need to restart the game) when leaving DR mode.

I haven't heard of people sharing resources between the two games. As far as I know, each game looks in subdirectories of it's main game directory for the art assets, voice packs, etc. I don't know if there is a way to tell the game to look elsewhere. You can same some space by not expanding the compressed archive files (art.ff, sound.ff, etc.) completely. The game should know to look in those archives if it can't find the files in the appropriate folder. Conversely, if you need all of those archived files expanded because you like to create/install/experiment with the custom content, it might save some space to extract all the files in the archive and then remove the archive files (which I am pretty sure are the same as those found on the install CDs).

I suppose it might be possible to install both games with the same base game directory, which would allow sharing some of those resources. But, I don't know how much trouble it would cause in terms of unintended sharing of incompatible resources. That is, both games look in their Data subfolders for anything that a given mod doesn't have its own version of. But having both Data folders be the same would probably be a disaster.

Installing either (or both) games on an external drive shouldn't be harder than installing most other Windows programs that use the registry on an external drive. I haven't tried it, but it may be possible.