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wiseowise
tobyjsullivan
> agree with authors, every game older than 10 years, and that is not in active development, should be made open source so that community
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.
ASalazarMX
Fallout 4 is ten years old and just recently was sold again as a remake, basically a small update with pre-included mods. Skyrim is 14 years old and I'm sure it will be resold at least one more time before TES VI is released.
Moddable games are like prescription pills that add one ingredient to a patent-expired recipe, to repatent it as new.
SSLy
> Skyrim is 14 years old and I'm sure it will be resold at least one more time before TES VI is released.
you wouldn't believe what just did hit Nintendo Switch 2's eShop.
hiccuphippo
I'd extend it to all copyright but instead of "active development" make it a nominal fee every 10 years, so anyone that doesn't mind their work becoming public domain 10, 20, 30, etc years later can easily let it go.
aeonfox
Most IP owners would pay the tiny fee just to hold onto IP rights and do absolutely nothing with it. If I were designing this hypothetical legislation I'd make it 10 years without a release that works on new hardware and the copyright is lost. This would at least incentivise the owners to do remasters just to hold onto the IP, something that would make them a few bucks anyway.
kiicia
And is in even worse state than switch 1 version was… that’s achievement in itself I guess…
integralid
>Nevertheless, I’d be thrilled if that was a standard practice.
Or we could shorten copyright to something reasonable, like 15 years after release.
systemtest
2003 is 22 years ago. The events in the game take place 16 years in the past.
I feel nostalgic for Vice City the same way people felt nostalgic for the 80s when the game was released.
medstrom
Damn, the 80s felt that recent?
smt88
No, because culture seems to change more slowly now.
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.
stuaxo
We were much younger so 16 years ago did not feel recent.
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 !
m463
I still hear the sound of cars going by when you stand on the sidewalk.
superasn
This works amazing well. I started playing and just 5 minutes in, I was completely hooked and ended up playing for almost half hour.
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!
systemtest
Vice City was originally planned as an add-on to GTA III. Development time was 18 months. Incredible that they put out such a great game in so little time.
emilbratt
Pushing the nostalgic effect aside, I agree. The gameplay is the important part and is why I can still play snes games to this day.
amarant
This got me thinking that one of my childhood favourites ought to be playable in the browser too, and sure enough, here's GTA 2 if anyone else is as old as I am:
djeastm
GTA 1 was the first computer game I ever remember buying with my own money:
https://dos.zone/grand-theft-auto-1997/
I can't get the radio music playing, unfortunately.
stuaxo
GTA came on a CD, lots of CDROM games of the time used CD Audio tracks, so an ISO won't have these, but a dump as bin + cue will.
doublerabbit
Carmageddon is another old classic of mine, https://dos.zone/carmageddon
I used to watch my older brother play this when I was younger and he always hid the CD.
amarant
Oh damn, my cousin had carmageddon! We'd stay up all night long playing it when I visited him!
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.
desdenova
Would that be Urban Chaos?
jtokoph
This is great. I also played the heck out of GTA2. I had a lot of fun attempting to mod the textures to get my favorite cars in the game. Respect is everything.
dashzebra
wsdfqfcf
If you know, you know.
agentifysh
this is one of the most impressive thing i've see on HN
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
sho_hn
> how is this done ?? what engine is used ? it feels exactly like the original
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).
alternatetwo
Pro tip: press R for free roam script in menu. This was a debugging feature in re3 and reVC.
sva_
If I had to guess, by being hosted in Russia they probably ignore the legality.
bossyTeacher
> how are they legal ?
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.
stevezsa8
In which country is unmarried cohabitation not legal?
brailsafe
Depends on your definition of marriage. Various places with common law automatically make you effectively married as far as family law and tax law are concerned, and insofar as people involve the courts.
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).
bossyTeacher
Iran, also in some US states like North Carolina and Missisipi (just not enforced).
kube-system
Today, Iran. And even parts of Europe as late as the 90s
ghssds
Burundi, since 2018.
kg
For the "how" see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46330258 - the game has been reverse engineered. There are reverse engineering and reimplementation projects like this for a lot of older games, i.e. Mario 64, Diablo and at least one of the Sonic games
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.
charcircuit
reVC is clear copyright infringement distributing a derivative work based off the code of the game.
desdenova
It was already brought down by Rockstar as well.
This isn't just reverse engineering, it's a decompiled source from the original binary.
basch
If you boot the game, it only loads the demo, and it tells you to supply your own game file to play the rest.
sho_hn
I did this with Tomb Raider once:
https://eikehein.com/stuff/sabatu/
(Here with a fan level to avoid copyright concerns.)
MinimalAction
Crazy! Brought back the summers of my childhood where I mindlessly roamed around the Vice City with my custom MP3 list of songs. For so long, I was stuck on flying the RC helicopter in an abandoned skyscraper level. It has been years, and now I have the itch to try that again!
Thanks to whoever made this possible. There goes my weekend.
Exuma
Which was the GTA where you rode around on a dirtbike out in the california mountains, and there was like bootleggers and stuff.... man i have serious memories of that game
chistev
ALL YOU HAD TO DO WAS FOLLOW THE DAMN TRAIN, CJ!
Exuma
Dude............omg..............holy SHIT i forgot about that. NOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
eftychis
San Andreas
698969
If you don't have the original executable on hand:
localStorage.setItem('vcsky.haveOriginalGame', "true")
I haven't checked further than the third mission
em-bee
doesn't seem to work
dahateb
you have to call it on the cdn page: https://cdn.dos.zone/vcsky/release/vc-sky-en-v5/game.js reload on the original page an then it works
ekjhgkejhgk
I'm so old that GTA in 3D still feels new.
dailen
And it consumes less RAM than msn.com
sehugg
GTA Vice City was released for iOS devices in 2012, and IIRC it ran pretty well. Not surprising that it runs well with WASM/WebGPU, given the massive increase in GPU performance. I'd imagine that the CPU-bound paths are well-optimized for 2002 Pentiums.
al_borland
I just re-downloaded Vice City on my iPhone yesterday. It runs well, but the on-screen controls are, well, on-screen controls. That limits how much I actually want to play it.
hoten
Does a USB/bluetooth gamepad work on that version? Or are people really out there playing GTA on a tiny touch screen?
al_borland
I just tried an 8bitdo controller I had lying around. It does work, but the controls seem all wrong and need to be remapped. I may do that.
I never carry a controller with me. I'd love to just be able to pick up and play in a waiting room or something without needing to plan for it or having an awkward setup. The MCON looked promising, but still probably bigger than what I'd want to carry around.
pipes
I came here hoping to see some technical explanation of what this is. E.g.JavaScript emulation of PS2 version? Recompilation + wasm? Something else entirely?
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Still remember how my PC was freezing on VC 20 years ago, and now I can play it in a browser in 120 fps. Wild.
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.