Emulation

Installing 7th Heaven Mods via Winlator for FF7 OG

A number of years ago, I was the first documented person to install New Threat 1.5 to the iOS version of Final Fantasy 7 using a jailbroken iPhone 8 (as far as I know) and posted my findings to Reddit.

When I moved back to Android, I was unable to recreate my little trick due to how permissions had recently changed.

I wanted to attempt loading New Threat 2.0 via winlator, so I got to work, and wanted to share with my fellow Lemmings.

Since New Threat 2.0 is available via standalone installer AND 7th Heaven, I wanted to use the iro file from 7th Heaven. The installer would be as simple as installing the mod on your PC copy, then moving the changed file structure to overwrite files in your FF7 install on Winlator. Too simple. Too easy.

This is merely a POC for installing 7th Heaven mods to FF7 through Winlator as 7th Heaven is an absolute monster to get running on Winlator.

This tutorial goes on the assumption you have a completely clean install of FF7 from Steam on a PC as the work will be done there to set up the folder structure, as well as a fresh RUNNING install of FF7 via Winlator. Strap in, it's a long one.

Starting the install

1. Download your chosen mod. We'll of course be using New Threat 2.0 in this example. Download the iro and find the path it downloaded to. The default path is ..\SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\FINAL FANTASY VII\mods\7th Heaven

2. Inside 7th Heaven, go to Tools tab > IRO Tools > Unpack IRO tab Unpack your IRO to a new folder called NT somewhere on your machine.

This should spit out the following file structure:

-ConditionalMidgalBat/
-ConditionalVolcano/
-hext/
-New Threat - Sega Chief/
-OptionDifficultyModifier/
mod.xml
no_change.png
nt_preview.png
Readme.txt

We won't need any of the loose files, just the folders.

3. Make a new folder here called direct.

4. Take the contents of the New Threat - Sega Chief folder and move them into this direct folder

You should now have the following inside of ..\NT\direct\

-battle\
-battle.lgp\
-char.lgp\
-flevel.lgp\
-kernel\
-menu\
-music\
-music_ogg\
-world_us.lgp\

You can ignore step 5 if you wish as NT has a default scene.bin to set the difficulty

5. Open the OptionDifficultyModifier folder, and choose which difficulty you'd like to use, either Struggle or Relax. Inside of either folder you choose, there is another battle folder. Copy this and paste it into your direct folder. It will ask you to overwrite - choose yes.

6. Back to the root of our NT folder, if you'd like to have materia slots with 3 links, open the OptionMultiLinkedSlots folder > open the Enabled folder. Copy this kernel folder and paste into your direct folder. It will ask to overwrite, choose yes.

7. Copy the contents of the ConditionalVolcano and ConditionalMidgalBat folders, paste them into your direct folder as well.

8. Now go download FFNx from here: https://github.com/julianxhokaxhiu/FFNx/releases

I chose the stable FFNx-Steam-v1.23.0.0.zip release instead of the Pre-Release 1.23.0.26 version. - keep this zip after unzipping it.

10. Unzip this archive directly into your Final Fantasy VII folder and overwrite when asked.

11. Open 7th Heaven and start FF7 with New Threat enabled. Just get to the New Game prompt and quit. This should change out your ff7_en.exe for a different one - a backup is automatically created in the FINAL FANTASY VII folder under 7H2.0-BACKUP.

Go back into 7th Heaven and Disable New threat.

12. Now, copy your direct folder AND the hext folder, then paste into your Final Fantasy VII folder so that direct, hext, and ff7_en.exe are visible in the same location. It may ask to overwrite or merge, say yes.

Now, here's the kicker. 7th Heaven automatically deals with the file paths properly unlike FFNx does alone, so we need to change some folder structures. While vanilla FFVII DOES have a ..\data\battle folder, it does NOT have the files inside in the same place, so FFNx will not know to redirect the vanilla files to our New Threat files. We need to fix that.

13. Inside of your direct folder, find the battle folder. NOT battle.lgp, JUST battle. Create a new folder called lang-en inside of the direct folder and copy your battle folder inside of it.

You should now have ..\Final Fantasy VII\direct\lang-en\battle

14. Go back to your direct folder, and find the kernel folder. Copy this kernel folder into lang-en the same way you did the battle folder from the previous step.

Testing the install

1. Now, with our mods in the correct position, double-check in 7th Heaven that New Threat is disabled, and launch FF7 VIA STEAM just to confirm the mods are being loaded directly by the game.

2. If you get the prompt to choose Scenario A or B after choosing New Game, that's an excellent sign! Choose Scenario B and Standard difficulty, then start the game.

3. Take note on if you see Tifa come off the train. If so, open your menu and check Cloud's magic. If he has fire, ice, AND bolt, move forward until the scripted battle with the two MP enemies.

If you actually start a battle with two MP enemies, you should be in the clear! The hard part is over with!

If not, something is screwed up!

If all of the above worked, New Threat is working in FF7 without 7th Heaven doing the injecting, so now it's time to move it over to your Winlator install!

OPTIONAL

I chose to name the folder containing the mods direct due to FFNx already being set to look for this folder by default. You can change this folder name by opening the FFNx.toml file and change line 499 from "direct" to whatever you want.

If you want to set up multiple mod folders, you can rename your direct folder NewThreat and change "direct" to "NewThreat" or whatever you'd like, then change this line again later to match the new mod folder name later to run it instead, just follow this guide loosely for other mods and give it a different name in the root of your FINAL FANTASY VII folder.

Keep in mind, these folder names are case sensitive so be very specific in your naming if you change it.

Not as easy as 7th Heaven on a true Windows box, but it's as good as you're gonna get through Winlator.

Moving the install to Winlator

1. Zip your direct folder (you can exclude the 7th Heaven folder if you wish), your hext folder, and your ff7_en.exe files together and copy them over to your device in a directory that Winlator can access.

If you did the optional step and renamed your direct folder to something else, add the FFNx.toml file to this zip as well.

We zip these files together because there are a TON of tiny loose files in these folders and we all know how Windows Explorer loves to take its sweet time with thousands of small files.

2. Copy over the FFNx-Steam-v1.23.0.0.zip you downloaded earlier as well to the same location.

3. Find your ff7_en.exe and rename it. I renamed mine to ff7.exe.bak personally.

4. In this order, move the unzipped files into your FF7 install on Winlator:

- ff7_en.exe
- FFNx zip contents, overwrite when prompted
- direct folder
- If you changed the direct folder name, now copy over the FFNx.toml, overwrite when prompted

This should be enough to get it going.

Conclusion

And that's it! Load up FF7 via Winlator and give it a shot.

This took way longer than I'd have liked but hey, it works. If you have issues with this or another mod install, post here and I can try to help you out.

OC by @Cyanogenmon@lemmy.world