Tips for running GTA?

[DavidN]

#807

Does anyone have any advice on the best way to run the game (for those of us who don’t have a genuine 486 within easy reach? 🙂 ) My experience so far has been:

– Downloaded it from an emulator site and I’m sorry (the game is in a weird state where it was released for free by Rockstar but isn’t officially freeware, and Rockstar no longer offers the download)
– The Windows version, miraculously, runs without complaining on Windows 10 but the performance is janktastic
– The DOS version has three further subdivisions:
— GTA8.EXE is the one that works the best through Dosbox-X – it’s playable even if it stutters a bit when a lot’s going on, but I’m not getting any sound.
— GTA24.EXE is the high-colour version, but bizarrely renders only half the screen! I later found out that this only applies to the 320x240x15 (15-bit colour?!) modes – putting it up to 320x240x32 through the F11 menu works about as well or slightly better than GTA8.EXE. Higher resolutions drop off in performance fast.
— GTAFX.EXE is the 3DFX version and drops me to DOS on game start with a missing DLL error. I found GLIDE2X.DLL and GLIDE2X.OVL in a Glide wrapper, dropped them into the directory, ran it again and it gave me a funny “What 3DFX card?” error instead 🙂

So it looks like GTA24 set on 320x240x24 is my best option – any other thoughts?

[rnlf]

#808

I think many people have problems running it on a modern computer. I was going to prepare a FreeDOS VM, hoping it would run better. But the GTA24 version is the best looking in my opinion, so you don’t really lose anything by playing that.

The 3DFX version looks too blurry for me.

I just tried the F11 menu, didn’t even know about it 🙂

I honestly don’t think the higher resolutions than 320×240 are worth it.

15-Bit color was quite common, even in the Windows era. It’s basically 16-Bit but with the same number of bits per color channel, which, I assume, makes it easier to program for.

[rnlf]

#809

Oh dear, let’s forget about the VM solution. VirtualBox’ VESA emulation is incompatible with GTA.

I think running the game on Windows could be a good option for most.

Concerning the 3DFX: If you really want it to work, you’ll have to put the GLIDE2X.OVL into the GTADOS directory, not the GTA directory. I’m not sure you were trying that. I’ve never used Glide wrapper, no idea wher the DLL goes 🙂

[DavidN]

#810

Yep, I think that GTA24.EXE or the Windows one (if I can find the right compatibility settings to get the performance up) is looking like the best option.

Incidentally I love that the 8-bit and high-colour versions look so different – the GTA8 ones aren’t just low-colour variants of the tiles, they’re a completely separate tile set and it almost looks like a different game. I’ve heard that this is because as the graphics evolved during development, they just sort of forgot to translate their new graphics back to the GTA8 version 🙂

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[DavidN]

#812

(Add Another File doesn’t work on Chrome, gives “Uncaught ReferenceError: gdbbPressAttachmentsInit is not defined”!)

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[DavidN]

#817

Aha, and I have sound working! The setup application, for some reason, is called K.EXE – I had overlooked it completely.

[rnlf]

#818

Good to know! I think some people had problems running the game in DOSBox.