Fanmade Dreamcast port of Grand Theft Auto III being worked on; WIP footage shown

How many of you were aware the Grand Theft Auto III (2001) was originally meant to have a version on Sega Dreamcast? It moved away from Dreamcast after developer DMA Design, today known as Rockstar North, came into agreement that the Dreamcast was no longer a viable platform for the game, most likely due to Sega bowing out of the console hardware race in 2001. Had the game released on Dreamcast as originally intended, it would’ve gone on to be a major feather in the Dreamcast’s cap for years to come.

While we can’t go back in time and make DMA Design stick to it’s original Dreamcast release plans, one fan has taken it upon themselves to convert the game over to Dreamcast. Homebrew developer SKMP has been building a new Dreamcast GTA III port using assets and reverse engineered code from the original PC version. Lately, he’s even gained some help from a few other Dreamcast homebrew developers, including Frogbull, who’s best known for creating a Metal Gear Solid 2 tech demo for Dreamcast. While the port is still work-in-progress as of this writing, what’s been done so far is nothing short of amazing. After all, just because GTA III was originally meant to be a Dreamcast game, doesn’t mean that bringing the finished game to Dreamcast is as simple as you might think.

You’ll find out more about what I mean past the break.

Here, you can see a demonstration of GTA III running on original Dreamcast hardware, courtesy of Frogbull. You can follow him on YouTube to see more progress updates on the port.

It’s worth noting that before Frogbull started helping with this port, SKMP had trouble getting the game working on unmodified Dreamcast hardware, Before, he could only get it working on a Dreamcast with a 32MB Video RAM upgrade. A stock Dreamcast has only 8MB of VRAM. Frogbull has also used some special tricks of his to fix color issues with the game’s texture work.

If you are a developer experienced in Dreamcast software development, you can look at the Gitlab page to check out what’s being done with the coding so far. This is also where you’ll be able to download the port to try for yourself, though it requires you to compile the assets from a PC version of GTA III, plus you have to compile your own .CDI file of the game to run on Dreamcast. You can also follow SKMP and Frogbull on Twitter to see more updates on the port’s progress directly from them.

So are you excited to see GTA III finally come to Dreamcast? Have you played GTA III or any other game in the series before? Have you posted in the comments section lately, or just ignoring me every time I ask you to say something in the comments below?

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