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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
> 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).
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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?
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
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.
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.
Moddable games are like prescription pills that add one ingredient to a patent-expired recipe, to repatent it as new.
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!
https://dos.zone/grand-theft-auto2/
https://dos.zone/grand-theft-auto-1997/
I can't get the radio music playing, unfortunately.
I used to watch my older brother play this when I was younger and he always hid the CD.
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.
If you know, you know.
https://eikehein.com/stuff/sabatu/
(Here with a fan level to avoid copyright concerns.)
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
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).
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.
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.
Thanks to whoever made this possible. There goes my weekend.
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