It is not an April Fool’s joke despite releasing on the day but GTA Vice City can now be played on the Dreamcast. As fans wait to visit modern day Vice City in GTA 6, they can now experience the 80’s once again but on Sega’s final console.
Back in September, we shared details about a group of dedicated Dreamcast modding enthusiasts that wanted to port Rockstar’s first 3D GTA title, GTA III, to the console it was originally going to release on. They did just that and released a playable Alpha in December.
Now the collective and taken things further. They have got GTA Vice City up and running on the Dreamcast. The game was not in development for Sega’s failed system. It discontinued the hardware over a year before Rockstar released Vice City.
Visiting Vice City On Dreamcast
You might be wondering how this is even possible. The difference under the hood between GTA III and Vice City is not that much. They’re largely the same codebase. Obbe Vermeij who was a technical director on the game said himself the game was “the same code”.
In a Tweet on Tuesday, @falco_girgis shared the group of Dreamcast modders have published a playable beta of Vice City along with details and gameplay footage of it in action. The game features a custom 2x FSAA graphics setting for a smoother appearance plus a 24bpp framebuffer video mode.
Of course, this is a beta so it is not perfect. There are some bugs and performance is not quite 30FPS locked. Despite that though the game actually runs better than GTA III. One of the fans who has contributed to this project asked Obbe Vermeij why Grand Theft Auto Vice City performs better than III on Dreamshell. Vermeij replied saying he doesn’t know but did suggest given how similar the games were, optimisations made to the engine for Vice City
These issues will hopefully be sorted in time. They do not take away from this incredible feat. Afterall the Sega Dreamcast had worse specs than the PS2. It will be exciting to see any more progress made by the group on this and the other GTA projects.
If you want to play the Dreamcast version of GTA Vice City you can using a legally obtained copy of the game and this link that explains how you can convert for Dreamcast.
In other recent GTA Vice City news, a pre-release version of it leaked in February. It contained several differences to the version that shipped in late 2002. Meanwhile a fan project remaking the classic game was hit with copyright claims on YouTube but still released.
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