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.
I'd extend it to all copyright but instead of "active development" make it a nominal fee every 10 years, so anyone that doesn't mind their work becoming public domain 10, 20, 30, etc years later can easily let it go.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
I'd extend it to all copyright but instead of "active development" make it a nominal fee every 10 years, so anyone that doesn't mind their work becoming public domain 10, 20, 30, etc years later can easily let it go.
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.
>Nevertheless, I’d be thrilled if that was a standard practice.
Or we could shorten copyright to something reasonable, like 15 years after release.
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:
https://dos.zone/grand-theft-auto2/
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.
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.
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.
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.
wsdfqfcf
If you know, you know.
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.
Site connects to yandex.ru
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.
Amazing it runs in a browser.
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
If I had to guess, by being hosted in Russia they probably ignore the legality.
> 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).
Pro tip: press R for free roam script in menu. This was a debugging feature in re3 and reVC.
If you boot the game, it only loads the demo, and it tells you to supply your own game file to play the rest.
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.
> 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.
In which country is unmarried cohabitation not legal?
Today, Iran. And even parts of Europe as late as the 90s
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.
reVC is clear copyright infringement distributing a derivative work based off the code of the game.
I did this with Tomb Raider once:
https://eikehein.com/stuff/sabatu/
(Here with a fan level to avoid copyright concerns.)
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 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
San Andreas
I'm so old that GTA in 3D still feels new.
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.
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?
Says reVC in the description, so it's been decompiled from the original Vice City binary and then reimplemented in JavaScript/WebAssembly.
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
There are QOL mods[0] available for that version to get the camera (and controller in general, and other stuff) working better.
Can't speak to the Deck HW or Steam OS specifically, but the SilentPatch and GInput mods have been working great for me on Proton under Linux Mint.
[0]https://cookieplmonster.github.io/mods/gta-vc/
Sensible Soccer is so true to the original. It's even impossible to quit it!
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.
Is something similar available for GTA3?
Saw some funny bugs I don't remember from the original, but it looks a lot better.
I wish all ps2 games were playable and available on such a site
Links times out, seems the host wasn't ready for the HN traffic!
Wine in the browser would be so interesting for retro software.
Wow that worked shockingly well on my cheap Moto phone!
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...
It runs insanely well what the hell!
is this some WASM magic?
better than the original rockstar PC port...
I kneel
Feels pretty smooth on my phone for something that's running in the browser.
Wow!!
So awesome
Ah shit, here we go again