As it turns out, Sega’s long defunct Dreamcast console is still thinking. The company behind the machine cut support long ago due in part to the commercial pressures applied by Sony’s PlayStation 2 console, but that never stopped the most dedicated of Dreamcast fans from seeking out its true potential. Thanks to [Stefanos] and his team, the genre defining Grand Theft Auto III (GTA 3), can now run on Sega’s hardware. Their combined efforts have yielded a fully playable port of the PC version of the game for the Dreamcast.
The porting effort was years in the making. It began with reverse engineering the entire source code of GTA 3 then implementing it into the homebrew SDK for the Dreamcast, KallistiOS. All the in-game graphic and sound assets are only pulled from a user provided PC copy of the game. Steps for those seeking to compile a bootable Dreamcast image of their own have been provided on the project’s website. Real hardware enthusiasts will be pleased as the port runs fine on the twenty-five year old Dreamcast as evidenced in the video below.
This port of GTA 3 represents what could have been a true butterfly effect moment in console gaming history. The game was a major hit in the early days of the PlayStation 2, and it has been theorized that it could have proven to be a major commercial success for Sega as well had it been pressed onto a Dreamcast GD-ROM disc. Recently one of the original developers of GTA 3, Obbe Vermejj, divulged that the game actually began development on the Dreamcast. The project was obviously transferred onto PlayStation 2 for commercial reasons, but with this port from [Stefanos] and crew we no longer have to dream of what could have been.
I was a developer when the PS2 and dreamcast were getting started. Sony refused to give any PS2 devkits to any game studio that had dreamcast kits and were making dreamcast games. We had to shelve our dreamcast game so that we could get access to SP2 devkits. The dreamcast was the better system.
Good old, PowerVR.
Performance wise… I don’t know. The video in the article shows what feels like high single to low teens in fps. Playable? For sure, but the PS2 version was way smoother than this.
I disagree. This is a pc port on Dreamcast. This isn’t a native ps2 version.
But you’re looking an amateur fan-made port, running on top of a fan-made hardware SDK. There’s no reason to think this is representative of the performance you would see if Rockstar did a AAA commercial release on Dreamcast.
A more useful (but still deeply flawed) comparison would be Crazy Taxi on Dreamcast vs Grand Theft Auto 3 on PS2 (keeping in mind that GTA3 came out years later and had a very large budget).
An to quote the project’s FAQ:
“Are the graphics and performance comparable to other versions, like the PS2?
Yes and no. Graphically, the game is very close (or even superior) to the PlayStation 2 version. However, since it’s in the alpha stage, the performance is not yet as smooth as the PS2 version. As the project is based on the PC version, the game includes more detailed models and more elements in the city, which impacts performance. Future updates will continue to optimize the experience.”
I mean that project claim is not really true though is it? I have compared them closely and the ported DC version has nothing like the draw distance compared to PS2, lower quality textures, massive pop in of geometry and textures. Lower quality audio and it is missing most of the cool particle effects. Like the smoke from damaged cars or fog, the way objects break into pieces. It misses most of PS2’s shading effects like motion blur or the screen tints for time of day and weather, as well as a bunch of subtle effects like color tints on all vehicles passing under traffic lights. When enabled the version of motion trails reduce the framerate more. That is sub 20FPS, and when it rains the frames tanks even further. Performance is probably propped up as it is with all the missing assets. The fact that a lot less is being rendered at any given moment because of the far greater pop in. Look, it’s great the game runs at all and the achievement is impressive, but it’s not really on par with the first version of the game which was on PS2.
Few pro
GTA3 was an early first generation title for PS2. I would argue that it also was not fully representative of what PS2 could do. Show me a Dreamcast game that looked as good with the kind of complex shading and geometry comparable to Final Fantasy 12, Metal Gear Solid 3 or Gran Turismo 4 to name but a few. They just don’t exist. This was settled 20 years ago. Secondly this port displays why Dreamcast would struggle to run many of these first generation PS2 titles: the disc streaming issue is a major one. We’re seeing heavily compressed assets on this DC port and they still do not stream properly. There’s no render distance. Pop in is everywhere. It barely worked on PS2 as it was. GDROM had one third the transfer performance of PS2’s DVD drive and far less capacity. You can squeeze GTA3 down with modern compression (and lose some quality) to fit on a single GDROM disc, but not Vice City or San Andreas without major quality cut backs. They were much larger games, and not practical multi disc titles with the nature of their seamless worlds. So many games of this type relied on disc data streaming. This port is demonstrating how critical it was.
Lawsuit incoming in 5…4…
It’s a clean-room recreation of the game engine, and they seem to be careful not to distribute any of the assets, so it’s not clear there’s any ground for legal action. They even seem to avoid using the name “Grand Theft Auto” on their website.
The way Sony advertised the PS2 hardware was very similar to the way Sega advertised the Genesis Blast processor. Looking at various comparative tables with hardware information it is clear that the two worst consoles of this generation were the DC and the PS2, the GC was between these two consoles and the much more advanced Xbox.
https://segaretro.org/Sega_Dreamcast/Hardware_comparison