Whew, alright listen, for those interested in this kind of stuff: Unsatisfied with googling and repeating what other people claim, I mounted the PSX Final Fantasy VII CD images with Daemon Tools and did my own research, digging into the innards of the games files. This produced some interesting things.



Above I stated that some of the background, movie, music etc. files are repeated on the three game discs, taking up unnecessary files.



This proved to be not entirely true.



Everything is repeated on the three discs. Absolutely everything: With the exception of the movie files, the three Final Fantasy VII discs are identical.



That's right. The entire game of Final Fantasy VII is 243mb in size, and Squaresoft didn't bother to use only the stuff needed on each seperate disc, they just put the entire game on each disc and filled up the remaining 400mb with full motion video. Every background image, every enemy model, every piece of dialogue can be found on each of the three discs. They could have released this easily on the N64 if it weren't for the movie files. Brilliant!



So I took a look at what else is there. I guessed that the music files could not use more than 5-10mb. I was a little off. Final Fantasy VII's entire soundtrack is only 824kb.



Then there's the 3D data. The enemies (11mb), magic spells, effects and character models (45mb), battle stages (14mb) and the world map (30mb), all in all a mere 100mb. A DS version would use slightly smaller textures, maybe a bit less polygons and simplified effects, and better compression. This stuff would be at least 30% smaller. 70mb.



Field-Data is the most interesting. It's a big folder and basically contains all the story related stuff: Backgrounds, background depth information, events, and all of the dialogue.



For every scene, there's the background image (.mim), the respective depth information so the game knows whats in front and what's behind of the 3D character (.bsx) and all the dialoge that happens there (.dat)



The 787 different .mim files = 110mb

the .bsx files = 20mb

the .dat files = 10mb



As explained above, the background image data can be more than halved in size. The .bsx and .dat files probably can't, making a DS-Version of this stuff approx. 75MB in size.



What I said about the movies remains the same. 75MB.



And finally there are about 6mb of game code.



Now we have some definitive numbers to work with! What space is needed in order to put this entire game onto a DS card?



movies (75mb)

+ field-data (75mb)

+ 3D-data (70mb)

+ game code and music (7mb)

---------------------------

= 227 MB





Maximum size for a DS game nowadays: 256 MB. Now I don't know what additional data is required to put this on the DS, but I dare say Square should be able to handle this.

