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

https://dos.zone/grand-theft-auto-vice-city/
194•Alifatisk•2h ago

Comments

HardwareLust•2h ago
Wow that worked shockingly well on my cheap Moto phone!
striking•2h ago
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.rockstarga... has been available since 2012! The only difference here is some web browser overhead, which isn't much anymore...
bgirard•2h ago
Wow, crazy to see this childhood classic load and run seamlessly in my browser. Better than on my old hot wheels pc.
christkv•2h ago
So awesome
mmaunder•1h ago
Wow!!
wiseowise•1h 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•1h 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•32m 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.

integralid•5m 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.

Ram10-•1h ago
Wine in the browser would be so interesting for retro software.
pipes•1h 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•1h ago
Says reVC in the description, so it's been decompiled from the original Vice City binary and then reimplemented in JavaScript/WebAssembly.
tsukurimashou•1h ago
better than the original rockstar PC port...
MinimalAction•1h 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.

amarant•1h 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/

doublerabbit•1h 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•35m 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.

dashzebra•1h ago
wsdfqfcf

If you know, you know.

jtokoph•1h 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.
djeastm•1h 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.

superasn•1h 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!

emilbratt•1h 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.
tigranbs•1h ago
Links times out, seems the host wasn't ready for the HN traffic!
rohan_•1h ago
is this some WASM magic?
lawlessone•1h ago
Feels pretty smooth on my phone for something that's running in the browser.
agentifysh•1h 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

kg•1h 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•1h ago
reVC is clear copyright infringement distributing a derivative work based off the code of the game.
sva_•1h ago
If I had to guess, by being hosted in Russia they probably ignore the legality.
bossyTeacher•1h 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•1h ago
In which country is unmarried cohabitation not legal?
kube-system•53m ago
Today, Iran. And even parts of Europe as late as the 90s
basch•59m 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•34m 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.
sho_hn•32m 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•26m ago
Pro tip: press R for free roam script in menu. This was a debugging feature in re3 and reVC.
_fat_santa•1h 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

sergiotapia•1h ago
It runs insanely well what the hell!
ekjhgkejhgk•1h ago
I'm so old that GTA in 3D still feels new.
admtal•1h ago
I wish all ps2 games were playable and available on such a site
RobRivera•1h ago
I kneel
Stevvo•1h ago
Saw some funny bugs I don't remember from the original, but it looks a lot better.
pinus-cembra•1h ago
Web browsers really have come a long way. Will be interesting to see where we'll be in 10 to 20 years.
doganugurlu•1h ago
Sensible Soccer is so true to the original. It's even impossible to quit it!
sehugg•1h 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•29m 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.
Exuma•1h 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•57m ago
San Andreas
dailen•1h ago
And it consumes less RAM than msn.com
wmoxam•57m ago
Ah shit, here we go again
sho_hn•35m ago
I did this with Tomb Raider once:

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

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

kaycebasques•29m ago
Is something similar available for GTA3?
onion2k•29m 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.

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

https://dos.zone/grand-theft-auto-vice-city/
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