Posted by Alifatisk 12/19/2025
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.
you wouldn't believe what just did hit Nintendo Switch 2's eShop.
Or we could shorten copyright to something reasonable, like 15 years after release.
I feel nostalgic for Vice City the same way people felt nostalgic for the 80s when the game was released.
Even in 1995, the 80s looked like a different planet. The fashions, cars, and even houses looked different.
The differences between 2003 and 2013, or between 2013 and 2023, are much less noticeable if you're just looking at fashion, cars, or cities.
Subjective time speeds up as we age, probably based on how long a give period is vs the rest of your life.
16 years was a much bigger % of your life then than it is now.
Think of 2 year old, a year ago was half their life !
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-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.
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.
After 1 year of cohabitation in Canada, couples are federally common law spouses for tax purposes. Provincially it depends, but after 2 years in some provinces you're technically and automatically spouses for family law purposes, which gives someone the same legal rights as an explicitly married couple in terms of asset division and parental obligations following a breakup (which is outdated and insane in many cases outside of having children, but whatever).
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.
This isn't just reverse engineering, it's a decompiled source from the original binary.
https://eikehein.com/stuff/sabatu/
(Here with a fan level to avoid copyright concerns.)
Thanks to whoever made this possible. There goes my weekend.
localStorage.setItem('vcsky.haveOriginalGame', "true")
I haven't checked further than the third mission