Game freezes at Squaresoft logo

[Kappa Kong]

Managed to play ~30 hours when I initially bought the game. Ran fine even with mods too. Came back after a few months and the game freezes right at the Squaresoft logo. Tried verifying integrity and reinstalling (w/o mods), but still the same result. I also have FF7 (steam) installed and that still functions normally after not playing for a few months.

The only thing different on my machine that might cause issues would be new video drivers, but I'm not sure.

Any ideas?

[MCINDUS]

Make sure you are running the game on single processor mode - go to your task manager, right click the ff8 exe and select processor affinity to 0. If that doesn't work, check your sound drivers - FF8 doesn't like surround sound settings and will sometimes crash if they're enabled. Last thing might be an issue with your dlls - make sure you do a full clean uninstall/install.

[Kappa Kong]

Appreciate the response. Managed to find the thread about CPU priority the other night. I don't really understand how it ran fine with all cores enabled to begin with, but at least I know the fix now. Thanks