After giving up on the Remake, it gave me a buzz to revisit the classic.
Tried the PS4-store version of the original Final Fantasy VII. Enjoyed the smooth cartoony character-sprites, but the pre-rendered backgrounds seem more blurry, lacking in resolution, when compared with the original PS1 disc. Even the shadows under the characters during battles look cheap and plain bad. The sound also seemed slightly distorted, as if it had its volume maximised.
So put on the original disc in the old PS1, connected via modest S-Video cable, and lo...the pre-rendered backgrounds really are sharper, more detailed. Sounds great too. Have to live with the the blockier characters & generally noisier image, tho'.
Looked online for an explanation: apparently Square lost the original RAW image files of the pre-rendered backgrounds. They had to make do with overly-compressed images for the PC/PS3/PS4-ports.
So the way to play the greatest game of all time with its original beautiful backgrounds is to play the original disc, or use mods for the Steam version which do some fancy Ai-based sharpening & upscaling.
Gonna compare original disc on PS1, PS2 & PS3 (which has smoothing option for PS1 disc games). Then this will likely be my gaming for the next few months lol