Just in case someone misses the point, this is a work of reverse engineering, not something coming from the actual developers of the game. Still pretty impressive and worth the read though!
How video game porting companies stay in business I do not know. Every story about video game programming seems to involve cutting corners to meet deadlines. With that in mind, porting companies must be handed the most vile and platform specific code, along with the expectation to get it working as fast as the original company did.
I feel kinda bad for Eidos, who I feel did a pretty good job with the port/ (I have played the PC version extensively.)
Because in the game industry studios seldom write portable software.
The business model is that you focus on a specific platform with other companies taking the burden to port it to other platforms.
One thing that helped this mentality was that most studios didn't want to use anything that wasn't developed in-house and the goal is to produce a game, not to be platform friendly.
Only in the last years has the mentality towards middleware use opened up.
Interesting to read how the kernel from FF7 shares a similar philosophy to that of the original FF, but was FF's system that different from its contemporaries?
> The kernel is a throwback to the very first Final Fantasy game for the Nintendo's original 8 bit system. The NES could only natively read 32 kilobytes of program ROM. To get around this incredible limitation, Nintendo developed "memory mappers" that allowed parts of the program to be switched out, or "banked" and replaced with other parts stored on the game cartridge.
Probably not that different, but that's no excuse to keep using bank switching on its core; it was usually painful, expensive, and limiting for the developers.
I'd imagine bank-switching a large ROM into 32 KiB of address space imposes constraints similar to those imposed by loading data from a slow-as-molasses 2X CD-ROM drive into 2 MiB of RAM.
The "qhimm team", from the qhimm website, are rather famous in the FFVII fanworld, it's probably the biggest modding community out there. The mods, mostly for the PC version of FFVII, have dragged the game over the various versions of Windows, improved the models, etcetera. In fact, if I'm not mistaken, one of the qhimm developers that made the game compatible for modern Windows versions and added graphical updates was hired by Square to work on FFVII's PC re-release a few months ago - at least, parts of the new code correspond to an existing mod.
