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Remember when some mad scientist was porting Grand Theft Auto III to the Sega Dreamcast? Well, you can now make your own port, and legally to boot.
Last year, we reported on dca3, a port of Grand Theft Auto III, as well as Grand Theft Auto Vice City, to the Sega Dreamcast. This project originally used re3, which was fully reversed source code from the two games.
A Temporary Stop In The Road
This was originally based on re3, a reverse engineering of the source code of these two Rockstar games. Unfortunately, Rockstar sued the developers behind re3 all the way back in 2021.
We won’t delve into the merits of the lawsuit here, but Rockstar dismissed their own lawsuit in 2023. This meant that Rockstar and re3’s mods each paid their own legal fees, but Rockstar can sue for similar claims in the future if they wanted to.
Why Couldn’t People Play These Ports Yet?
Now, dca3’s mods haven’t really been blocking fans from trying to play their port. But they made arrangements to make sure everything they do will pass legal review.
Their gitlab page shares instructions on how to build the Dreamcast ports of Grand Theft Auto III and Grand Theft Auto Vice City. But we’ll be upfront with you – these are instructions to partly code your own game.
While they do not instruct you to do anything legally spurious, most gamers will obviously be gated from the technical requirements of pulling this off.
So, we can all admit that most of us have been watching the videos this dev team has been making more than trying to play it ourselves. But that could change now.
Bring Your Own PC To DreamCast Ports
Today, developer Falco Girgis shared the good news on Twitter:
If you have yet to experience our “impossible” ports of Grand Theft Auto 3 and Vice City on your Sega Dreamcast, then I have a very special surprise for you today from jnmartin!
Despite not even being a member of our DCA team, he has taken it upon himself to answer your prayers and implement the same web-based, image generation tool as he just released for automatically generating DC-compatible images for Mario Kart 64, Star Fox 64, and Doom 64!
Simply follow the instructions provided by the automated build tool, providing your own (LEGALLY PURCHASED, DAMNIT) assets from either the Steam or PC versions of GTA3 and GTAVC, which will then be uploaded, converted, and then bundled into a Dreamcast-compatible CDI or ISO, which you can then download and play! You don’t have to compile a single line of code yourself, I promise!
So, to sum it all up quickly, you can now easily make your own Dreamcast ports of Grand Theft Auto III and Grand Theft Auto Vice City, using your own PC copies of the games.
The full instructions are here, and yes, this is considerably simpler than the instructions originally provided by the dca3 devs themselves.
