I play the original FF on a Mac. Some of the meshes I download show up as blank cubes instead of functional characters, although the individual parts of the mesh look okay to me. I'm sure it's something simple I don't understand. Trying to use FF on a Mac has had its tricky moments.

That usually occurs when the game cant find the mesh in the location that its supposed to be.
When you extract them from the archive, are you sure that they are extracting to the right place and not in some kind of subfolder etc...

I know some meshes are archived utilizing different folder settings, so not all meshes just extract cleanly. You sometimes have to watch to make sure the directory structure is right.

Thanks for the help.

Well, I've got the prolem that some of the meshes look like the white cube (the one with the black X on each side) had collapsedon the mesh. A few look like the color underneath shows up. Some work when I convert them again, some change when I change skins in the hero creation section, others (just about any Classic Beast mesh) don't.