Hardware Limitations

When the Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game Sword Art Online Final Fantasy XI: Online was in it’s heyday (if it ever had one), there was a phrase the Dev team would rely on when there were ideas the players had that the Dev team couldn’t fulfill. That phrase was “hardware limitations”.

I’m not a software engineer. I have some vague idea how software and the various parts of computer hardware all interact to make cool computer graphics and music. I’m a gamer. I’m generally pretty chill with Devs when it comes to most things. I’ve been getting barebacked by FFXI since before TOAU was released. By that, I mean: I’ve been playing stone cold retail vanilla. No third party apps. I tried a private server once (even with my Squeenix account still active), but I found the experience to be lackluster. Most stuff that the FFXI player base has asked for over the years they’ve gotten from the Devs. Which I think is really neat.

However…

…when I was downloading and installing FFXI to a new system, I ran into an error. I don’t remember what it was, I just remember it took a long, annoying time to fix. FFXIII-2 and the FFIII 3-D remake had similar issues. I thought I’d have an easier time fixing the problem with the FFIII 3-D remake because it named a specific .dll file in its error message. The .dll file in question was related to Windows C++ runtime packages based on OS versions (32 or 64 bit, and whether or not one has an AMD processor? I think?). Now, this is where the screencap above comes into play. The PC version of the FFIII 3D remake (the launcher, at least, maybe more), was apparently built on the bones of the launcher of the Final Fantasy VIII Steam release. Basically, I was trying to find a work around for that missing .dll file before I finally got the issue fixed, and eventually I stumbled on a huge list of Final Fantasy VIII locations (255 to be exact, though some listings were blank), a tutorial for Chocobo World in several languages (with English in last, because the English speaking nations deserve these glorious games the least), and finally, what’s found in the screencap above with the “Magic Booster” info which is unique to the 2013 Steam release. That’s kinda where I stopped because I started to go cross-eyed.

ANYWAYS, yeah. I dunno if this will help the modding communities at all or not, but I thought it was kinda neat and interesting to find.