Rockstar Games were developing GTA III for the Sega Dreamcast back in the day before it became a PS2 title. It eventually went on to release across PC, Xbox and even mobile phones but never the doomed Dreamcast. Now a group of GTA fans have decided to port the game to the console decades later.
Over the past few weeks, a few people in the Dreamcast modding scene have made major progress. Starting from nothing to modded consoles and now the game running on unmodded Dreamcasts is quite the sight to behold.
It all began when Twitter user @poiitidis shared they had started work on this port. They quickly released source code for the project allowing others to make an attempt. YouTube user Frogball took on the task and got the game running though a very low frame rate among other issues.
It also could only run on a modded Dreamcast console that sports 32mb of RAM as opposed to the 16mb found in retail units. For comparison, the PS2 had 32mb of RAM. In just a couple of weeks, Frogbull has since been able to fix various issues with models, textures.
Also, Poiitidis optimised the code and this has allowed Frogbull to run the game on a 16mb Dreamcast without the need of the RAM mod.
The most recent update from Frogbull shows the game having the same level of NPCs and vehicles as the PS2 version; a nice improvement over previous progress reports. Right now, the game still has low FPS and various bugs but at the rate of progress shown so far, it might not be in this state for long.
Curious about the Dreamcast controller layout for this game? Below is a diagram from Frogbull’s Patreon showing what buttons are mapped to which actions. This layout was inspired by the controls found in the PSP version of of GTA Liberty City Stories.
We look forward to seeing how this project develops over the coming weeks and months.
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