Hello everyone!
Earlier this year there was a thread on these forums regarding RE3, a reverse engineered effort of GTA III, and whether it could be ported to PowerPC. Well, during the same time I was also exploring the forgotten architecture and all its software, and likewise, the lack of games... but when the re3 source code was released (and taken down), I immediately wanted to bring my all-time favorite gaming franchise to the PPC OS X.
And after a few months of work patching it up on my slow hardware, it actually runs! Pitifully slow on my 400mhz/fx5200 with negative fps, but a person i'm working on this with reports better results with 1,8ghz/x800xt to almost becoming playable. So clearly, some optimization is necessary. However, it's really exciting seeing it work, and it didn't even take much effort -- most of the basic cross platform porting was already done by the initial reverse engineering team, and all I did was to make it compile under OS X Tiger.
There is a lot of work left to make it fully playable, and I'm also waiting for upgraded parts to develop and debug faster, but the initial results are very promising... so expect a native PowerPC release of GTA III in the future. =)
First picture is from the x800xt setup, while the second screenshot is from my own development setup. (Yeah, it's OS X Tiger with a custom theme... however to my knowledge this game should be compilable on Panther, or even Jaguar.)
Earlier this year there was a thread on these forums regarding RE3, a reverse engineered effort of GTA III, and whether it could be ported to PowerPC. Well, during the same time I was also exploring the forgotten architecture and all its software, and likewise, the lack of games... but when the re3 source code was released (and taken down), I immediately wanted to bring my all-time favorite gaming franchise to the PPC OS X.
And after a few months of work patching it up on my slow hardware, it actually runs! Pitifully slow on my 400mhz/fx5200 with negative fps, but a person i'm working on this with reports better results with 1,8ghz/x800xt to almost becoming playable. So clearly, some optimization is necessary. However, it's really exciting seeing it work, and it didn't even take much effort -- most of the basic cross platform porting was already done by the initial reverse engineering team, and all I did was to make it compile under OS X Tiger.
There is a lot of work left to make it fully playable, and I'm also waiting for upgraded parts to develop and debug faster, but the initial results are very promising... so expect a native PowerPC release of GTA III in the future. =)
First picture is from the x800xt setup, while the second screenshot is from my own development setup. (Yeah, it's OS X Tiger with a custom theme... however to my knowledge this game should be compilable on Panther, or even Jaguar.)