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You can now play Grand Theft Auto Vice City in the browser

276 pointsposted 8 hours ago

80 Comments

wiseowise

7 hours ago

Still remember how my PC was freezing on VC 20 years ago, and now I can play it in a browser in 120 fps. Wild.

Big kudos to https://github.com/SugaryHull/re3/tree/miami on which this is based on. Wholeheartedly agree with authors, every game older than 10 years, and that is not in active development, should be made open source so that community can keep games alive instead of letting them rot.

tobyjsullivan

7 hours ago

> agree with authors, every game older than 10 years, and that is not in active development, should be made open source so that community

Note that GTA V is now 12 years old and still sells ~20M copies per year. So that’s going to be a tough sell in some cases.

You could argue it’s still actively developed, particularly due to online, so fair enough.

But that’s also sort of true for Vice City. They’ve released mobile version (playable on Netflix) over the past few years at least.

Nevertheless, I’d be thrilled if that was a standard practice.

ASalazarMX

6 hours ago

Fallout 4 is ten years old and just recently was sold again as a remake, basically a small update with pre-included mods. Skyrim is 14 years old and I'm sure it will be resold at least one more time before TES VI is released.

Moddable games are like prescription pills that add one ingredient to a patent-expired recipe, to repatent it as new.

SSLy

2 hours ago

> Skyrim is 14 years old and I'm sure it will be resold at least one more time before TES VI is released.

you wouldn't believe what just did hit Nintendo Switch 2's eShop.

hiccuphippo

6 hours ago

I'd extend it to all copyright but instead of "active development" make it a nominal fee every 10 years, so anyone that doesn't mind their work becoming public domain 10, 20, 30, etc years later can easily let it go.

aeonfox

2 hours ago

Most IP owners would pay the tiny fee just to hold onto IP rights and do absolutely nothing with it. If I were designing this hypothetical legislation I'd make it 10 years without a release that works on new hardware and the copyright is lost. This would at least incentivise the owners to do remasters just to hold onto the IP, something that would make them a few bucks anyway.

integralid

6 hours ago

>Nevertheless, I’d be thrilled if that was a standard practice.

Or we could shorten copyright to something reasonable, like 15 years after release.

systemtest

5 hours ago

2003 is 22 years ago. The events in the game take place 16 years in the past.

I feel nostalgic for Vice City the same way people felt nostalgic for the 80s when the game was released.

medstrom

5 hours ago

Damn, the 80s felt that recent?

stuaxo

4 hours ago

We were much younger so 16 years ago did not feel recent.

Subjective time speeds up as we age, probably based on how long a give period is vs the rest of your life.

16 years was a much bigger % of your life then than it is now.

Think of 2 year old, a year ago was half their life !

superasn

7 hours ago

This works amazing well. I started playing and just 5 minutes in, I was completely hooked and ended up playing for almost half hour.

It could be that I'm a bit old-school, but this really seemed to confirm that ready to play fun gameplay trumps realistic graphics any day!

systemtest

5 hours ago

Vice City was originally planned as an add-on to GTA III. Development time was 18 months. Incredible that they put out such a great game in so little time.

emilbratt

7 hours ago

Pushing the nostalgic effect aside, I agree. The gameplay is the important part and is why I can still play snes games to this day.

amarant

7 hours ago

This got me thinking that one of my childhood favourites ought to be playable in the browser too, and sure enough, here's GTA 2 if anyone else is as old as I am:

https://dos.zone/grand-theft-auto2/

djeastm

7 hours ago

GTA 1 was the first computer game I ever remember buying with my own money:

https://dos.zone/grand-theft-auto-1997/

I can't get the radio music playing, unfortunately.

stuaxo

4 hours ago

GTA came on a CD, lots of CDROM games of the time used CD Audio tracks, so an ISO won't have these, but a dump as bin + cue will.

jtokoph

7 hours ago

This is great. I also played the heck out of GTA2. I had a lot of fun attempting to mod the textures to get my favorite cars in the game. Respect is everything.

doublerabbit

7 hours ago

Carmageddon is another old classic of mine, https://dos.zone/carmageddon

I used to watch my older brother play this when I was younger and he always hid the CD.

amarant

6 hours ago

Oh damn, my cousin had carmageddon! We'd stay up all night long playing it when I visited him!

Now I gotta find that other game he had, but I don't remember what it was called. It was kinda like reverse GTA: you played as a female cop and you had to stop the criminals. Iirc there were corrupt cops later on in the game.

desdenova

5 hours ago

Would that be Urban Chaos?

amarant

22 minutes ago

Yes! That's the one! Thanks! Omg, I need to play that game now!

dashzebra

7 hours ago

wsdfqfcf

If you know, you know.

agentifysh

7 hours ago

this is one of the most impressive thing i've see on HN

how is this done ?? what engine is used ? it feels exactly like the original

also the whole website dos zone seems to have all these browser versions of half life etc ???

how are people making these things and how are they legal ?

so many questions

sva_

7 hours ago

If I had to guess, by being hosted in Russia they probably ignore the legality.

sho_hn

6 hours ago

> how is this done ?? what engine is used ? it feels exactly like the original

It's most likely using reVC, a reverse-engineering of the original binaries by decompilation, and then built for the web using emscripten, which does a fairly good job making OpenGL code work on WebGL.

My Tomb Raider web build I linked here elsewhere was done the same way (reversing by the amazing people in the TR1X project).

alternatetwo

6 hours ago

Pro tip: press R for free roam script in menu. This was a debugging feature in re3 and reVC.

basch

7 hours ago

If you boot the game, it only loads the demo, and it tells you to supply your own game file to play the rest.

Hamuko

6 hours ago

The demo includes a lot of the game assets though. Looks like it has the full map, probably a lot if not all of the vehicles, peds too.

bossyTeacher

7 hours ago

> how are they legal ?

they are not, but then again so are many things. We choose what laws to enforce (see 18-20 year olds drinking, unmarried cohabitation, etc). just because it is not legal does not mean that law enforcement will care.

stevezsa8

7 hours ago

In which country is unmarried cohabitation not legal?

brailsafe

an hour ago

Depends on your definition of marriage. Various places with common law automatically make you effectively married as far as family law and tax law are concerned, and insofar as people involve the courts.

After 1 year of cohabitation in Canada, couples are federally common law spouses for tax purposes. Provincially it depends, but after 2 years in some provinces you're technically and automatically spouses for family law purposes, which gives someone the same legal rights as an explicitly married couple in terms of asset division and parental obligations following a breakup (which is outdated and insane in many cases outside of having children, but whatever).

kube-system

6 hours ago

Today, Iran. And even parts of Europe as late as the 90s

bossyTeacher

4 hours ago

Iran, also in some US states like North Carolina and Missisipi (just not enforced).

kg

7 hours ago

For the "how" see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46330258 - the game has been reverse engineered. There are reverse engineering and reimplementation projects like this for a lot of older games, i.e. Mario 64, Diablo and at least one of the Sonic games

Is it legal? Well, the reverse engineering typically is as long as you follow the rules, but hosting all the game assets on a public web server so you can play it probably isn't.

charcircuit

7 hours ago

reVC is clear copyright infringement distributing a derivative work based off the code of the game.

desdenova

4 hours ago

It was already brought down by Rockstar as well.

This isn't just reverse engineering, it's a decompiled source from the original binary.

MinimalAction

7 hours ago

Crazy! Brought back the summers of my childhood where I mindlessly roamed around the Vice City with my custom MP3 list of songs. For so long, I was stuck on flying the RC helicopter in an abandoned skyscraper level. It has been years, and now I have the itch to try that again!

Thanks to whoever made this possible. There goes my weekend.

sho_hn

6 hours ago

I did this with Tomb Raider once:

https://eikehein.com/stuff/sabatu/

(Here with a fan level to avoid copyright concerns.)

dailen

7 hours ago

And it consumes less RAM than msn.com

sehugg

7 hours ago

GTA Vice City was released for iOS devices in 2012, and IIRC it ran pretty well. Not surprising that it runs well with WASM/WebGPU, given the massive increase in GPU performance. I'd imagine that the CPU-bound paths are well-optimized for 2002 Pentiums.

al_borland

6 hours ago

I just re-downloaded Vice City on my iPhone yesterday. It runs well, but the on-screen controls are, well, on-screen controls. That limits how much I actually want to play it.

hoten

5 hours ago

Does a USB/bluetooth gamepad work on that version? Or are people really out there playing GTA on a tiny touch screen?

al_borland

5 hours ago

I just tried an 8bitdo controller I had lying around. It does work, but the controls seem all wrong and need to be remapped. I may do that.

I never carry a controller with me. I'd love to just be able to pick up and play in a waiting room or something without needing to plan for it or having an awkward setup. The MCON looked promising, but still probably bigger than what I'd want to carry around.

ekjhgkejhgk

7 hours ago

I'm so old that GTA in 3D still feels new.

Exuma

7 hours ago

Which was the GTA where you rode around on a dirtbike out in the california mountains, and there was like bootleggers and stuff.... man i have serious memories of that game

eftychis

7 hours ago

San Andreas

moondev

4 hours ago

I loved playing this but could never figure out how to beat it

https://dos.zone/norton-commander/

onion2k

6 hours ago

It's at least 20 years since I last played Vice City, and I can still remember my way around the map. That's weird.

pipes

7 hours ago

I came here hoping to see some technical explanation of what this is. E.g.JavaScript emulation of PS2 version? Recompilation + wasm? Something else entirely?

Hamuko

7 hours ago

Says reVC in the description, so it's been decompiled from the original Vice City binary and then reimplemented in JavaScript/WebAssembly.

ionwake

4 hours ago

Incredible! Not sure if I am just bad at the game, but I dont see any blood and the hookers dont get in the car. Maybe Im just remembering this wrong.

julianlam

3 hours ago

Does this version still corrupt your game file if you save at the ice cream factory lol

_fat_santa

7 hours ago

Haven’t tried this yet but I literally just loaded the OG PC version on my steam deck.

The originals are amazing but I have to say for all their faults, the Definitive Editions figured out the camera. For anyone that played the OG versions you were stuck with the “follow cam” unless you had a PC + Mouse

nix0n

5 hours ago

There are QOL mods[0] available for that version to get the camera (and controller in general, and other stuff) working better.

Can't speak to the Deck HW or Steam OS specifically, but the SilentPatch and GInput mods have been working great for me on Proton under Linux Mint.

[0]https://cookieplmonster.github.io/mods/gta-vc/