Originally intended for the Dreamcast, GTA III DC was eventually abandoned in favor of the PlayStation 2 for commercial reasons. Its development on SEGA's 128-bit machine had lasted 4 months before DMA Design changed its target console to Sony's machine.
An interesting anecdote is that SEGA could have acquired the GTA license in the 90s. The Japanese firm had been offered the rights to publish the first GTA on PC, but was unable to deliver it on PlayStation 1. Another publisher, who was also willing to pay more, was able to release it on both platforms and so they were finally given the privilege of handling it. Despite this still needing confirmation, I've finally found the right article to add this piece of information!
What would Grand Theft Auto 3 have looked like on Dreamcast? Could the developers have made it work? It's impossible to answer the first question, since only a technical demo with a character walking through an environment would have been made on SEGA's Dream Machine.
As for the second question, the developers were sure to have found solutions to make this possible. While technically this may seem complex, it is just a question of resources, technology, time and, above all, money. Teams who have been working together for a long time, with technologies they know perfectly well, can accomplish amazing feats.
For several months, talented fans have been trying to fill the void left by the project's cancellation in the early 2000s. They are now doing the impossible; offering the community a Dreamcast port of the PC version of GTA III. The port is based on KalistiOS and DreamSDK3, development tools regularly used for Homebrew.
Frogbull: « I tried to follow, but I was worn out in a week. »
Faced, no doubt, with the same problems that the original developers would have encountered had GTA III Dreamcast development gone further than a simple technical demo, they are coming up with tricks to make the game fit and playable on a standard Dreamcast. For example, they have reduced the number of polygons in the car models. Lack of memory was one of the main obstacles they encountered, though not an insurmountable one...
Certainly as a challenge, Stefanos Kornilios Mitsis Poiitidis (Skmp), known for being behind major Dreamcast emulators such as NullDC and Raicast, set out on his own to port GTA 3 to the Dreamcast. In a very short space of time, just two weeks, he solved the rendering problems - at first, the graphics were pink. As the project gained momentum and began to be talked about, other people eager to help joined in. So it came to pass that Frogbull (quoted in italics in this article), Jaxyn, Esppiral, Ian Micheal, Falco Girgis, PH3NOM and Adam Burrell all started contributing in their own way to this major fangame.
« Skmp started working on it on his own in June. He managed to recompile the DC decompilation (the *re3 project) in a very short space of time. After that, things went very quickly: he fixed the rendering problems on his own, then the problem of rendering 3D models, but it was also the titanic work done on the KOS that made it possible. »
*The aim of the “re3” projects is to port copyright-protected games to other consoles by Reverse Engineering the original source code and then rebuilding it from scratch without any elements that might belong to the original.
« Initially, I'd just gone to congratulate Skmp in a PM, we chatted a bit and he explained how to compile the mess, so that he wouldn't have to explain it 100 times to lots of people, I took notes and made a tutorial out of it. Then I try to help him with my weapons. »
During the Dreamcast port of GTA III, the build is freely available. Anyone can try it out and follow the live progress in bringing the game to SEGA's latest console. Modders even managed to modify the character's model, replacing it with that of Sonic and, even funnier, a Dragon Ball Z Super Saiyan. The future may well hold some surprises when it comes to modding this game!
« I'd like to highlight the significant improvement in Falco Girgis' rendering code (performance more than doubled), Skmp's switch to tristrip, which changed everything in terms of memory, and Jaxyn's fixed culling. My optimized 3D models are not used in current builds (and yet we've got insane performance, so imagine with it), in my build I only have one optimized car (the Kuruma) for example. »
There's no need to go back over the genesis of GTA and explain the game's history. The whole world, if not the universe, knows about this game that revolutionized the industry. Enjoy playing.
To play, carefully follow the tutorial on the page: regta3dc. You'll need to obtain the PC version of GTA III, then compile the Dreamcast version with the necessary tools. As Take-Two Interactive Software, the franchise's publisher, is very intransigent about the intellectual property of their titles, it is not advisable to offer the ISO in GDI or CDI of Grand Theft Auto Dreamcast as a direct download, which is why Stefanos Kornilios Mitsis Poiitidis and his team have not done so.
Comments