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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.
> 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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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If you know, you know.
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
> 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).
I did this with Tomb Raider once:
https://eikehein.com/stuff/sabatu/
(Here with a fan level to avoid copyright concerns.)
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.
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
If you don't have the original executable on hand:
localStorage.setItem('vcsky.haveOriginalGame', "true")
I haven't checked further than the third mission
I'm so old that GTA in 3D still feels new.
And it consumes less RAM than msn.com
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.
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?
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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.
Wow, crazy to see this childhood classic load and run seamlessly in my browser. Better than on my old hot wheels pc.
Web browsers really have come a long way. Will be interesting to see where we'll be in 10 to 20 years.
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
Sensible Soccer is so true to the original. It's even impossible to quit it!
Amazing it runs in a browser.
I loved playing this but could never figure out how to beat it
Does this one also crash when hitting people with a hammer?
I got that error when running reVC on the steam deck, especially during the union strike mission
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.
Really cool, amazed that the old cheats work as well!
The soundtrack is the best part of this game and I'm surprised this site is just allowing anyone to play this, with the soundtrack as-is.
the game has been removed by a DMCA take down request
It runs insanely well what the hell!
Does this version still corrupt your game file if you save at the ice cream factory lol
Saw some funny bugs I don't remember from the original, but it looks a lot better.
Feels pretty smooth on my phone for something that's running in the browser.
Links times out, seems the host wasn't ready for the HN traffic!
Woww superr game its real superr
Bhai mujhe bhi gta vice city khelni hai laptop pe
I wish all ps2 games were playable and available on such a site
Wine in the browser would be so interesting for retro software.
Wow that worked shockingly well on my cheap Moto phone!