Assistence requred with FF7 ISO's

[Yochab]

Hey everybody and thanks ahead for anyone willing to aid me in my request.

I have the ePSXe--PSX emulator, and some very common plugins that help me operate it. It's fully functional and I've already played several games on it.

Recently I managed to obtain the ISO files of Final Fantasy VII (7). There are three in number (I really hope that that's the correct amount of discs there should be, or else I'm missing something--please advise on that matter as well).

All of the ISO's I have "came" automatically in WinRAR format. I tried to open them by double clicking the files, and all this damn machine had to say is: "the archive is either in an unknown format or damaged". For startes I wish to know what the heck that means.

Later on I got the idea of just pressing the "open ISO" button in the ePSXe emulator. Well, fat luck that helped, because it didn't work. What's wrong here?

I ask of you to aid me in this situation since I'll kill just ot play the game. It is unattainable in the area I live in (This damn country--Israel, good for nothing ), so I can't just purchase the disc and press "play CDROM".
What am I to do now?

Thanks again for the readers and supporters,
Yochab.

[UW4NKA]

Sounds like you just have a corrupt download..
What's the filesize of each ISO?

[Yochab]

Umm, well the filesize of each of the files listed is:

The first one is about 620 MBs.
The second one is about 602 MBs,
And the third one is about 520 MBs.

Why? Do you suggest that files that big can be corrupted?--Because if so, that really bites the big one.

[Tekno-Kanix]

Hi,
You can do these 2 steps to see if your rar files are bad.

1. Right click on the rar file and select extract here from the winrar menu.

1a. If you have multiple rar files: *.01, *,02 *.r01, *,r02, etc etc. Right click on the 01 file and select from the drop down menu open with, then select winrar from the programs listing. If all is well
winrar will open with no errors, from here just click Extract To from the menu at the top.

2. Download and install 7zip http://www.7-zip.org/ /you might have to reset your computer. In some cases 7zip will extract the rar file where as winrar would not. Some people for some reason rename *.7zip.001 to *.rar - *.01 etc etc. Winrar will extract 7zip in most cases, but depending on some of settings used in compression format it will not and will give that same exact error as you mentioned.

Right click on the rar file and from the 7zip menu select extract here.

If you still have errors your downloads are bad. Sorry nothing you can really do but delete the files and re download them, not the same ones I would try to find a different source. Don't feel bad though this happens to everyone at some point or another.

Regards:
Vince

[Yochab]

First of all, I would really like to thank you for your divosion on the subject, and for helping me out like that. Really, thanks.

Umm.. The second thing I'm gonna do is to just simplify everything, delete the files I've downloaded, and just as you suggested me, I'll download them again from a different source. I am cetrain that this will save a lot of fussle in the future.

B.T.W-- Perhaps I wasn't so clear in my phrasing and description of my files. They only have the WinRAR icon to them, but ther are in .ISO format. So it doesn't matter which program I use to 'extract' them with, because they can't be extracted.

Well, thanks a WHOLE bunch Vince for your thought and care. I'll be posting here again if any other problems come out. Bye.

[UW4NKA]

Personally.. my FF7 images are ~700mb for disc 1 and 2 and over 600 for 3. But they're CloneCD images. They work though. =D
Also I usually just use that emulator pSX.

[Yochab]

So from what I gather, you recommend the pSX emulator rather then the ePSXe one, because of something.. Can you elabrate on why exactly do you recommend pSX?

Furthermore I have also concluded that as Vince wrote, my ISOs are corrupted or something of the matter.

In another subject, what are CloneCD ISOs?

Thanks again for your interest in this subject, and for all of you willingness to aid me,
Yochab.

[Tekno-Kanix]

Hi Yochab,
Lets try something else:
Download and install alcohol 120% http://www.alcohol-soft.com/
After it's installed start up the program and select the option Image Burning Wizard. Select and burn the FF7 CD 1 ISO to a blank CD with the PlayStation settings in alcohol 120%.


Once it's done try to run the game from the CD in ePSXe.
If that fails and you have a PSone console try doing the swap trick method and see if the game will work. If you don't know of the swap trick for PSone just Google it, it's all over the web and is quite easy to do.

NOTE in time this WILL wear out the motor, but on another note I've been doing this for years on my PSone console and my motor is fine. Just be easy when you swap the disc out. Like instead of snatching out the disc swap them in the same motion as the disc is turning. Turn your hand in motion with the motor. Don't grab the disc on the swap and make the motor make sudden stops! this is what breaks them. This part does take practice since you have to do this quick.

Also you where asking of Clone-CD, it makes 1:1 copies of disc. Any copies of disc made with this program should be OK.

About a year ago I made some backup copies of my Final Fantasy 7 disc with alcohol 120%. You can look at what size my ISO are vs. yours. The Power ISO File comment doesn't mean anything. It's just a virtual Device Manager such as Daemon Tools but has the option to mount much more drives and has more features.


Lets try this and we'll go from here.

Regards:
Vince