Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories Works Native on PC Thanks to a Fan

A fan developer, Jessica Natalia, got Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories – a PlayStation Portable game that only existed on Sony's console – able to operate natively on Windows, without using emulators. We can't download this fan port yet, but we hope it will be easily accessible soon. Vice City Stories, released in 2006, is a prequel set at Vice City and originally designed for the PlayStation Portable, Sony console of 2000s. The game has never received an official version for PC. The only way to play it outside the forgotten console was through an emulator, a potentially problematic technical solution from the legal point of view considered the location of Take-Two Interactive and Rockstar Games. Natalia's work is not an emulator, but a static recompiling. Instead of impersonating the PC the PSP in real time, it takes the compiled source code of the game and translates it into a real Windows executable, a file. EXE simply spins. It is faster, autonomous and equivalent to the native PC version of The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, currently available and based on its Nintendo 64 code. Aware of the risks of the project, Natalia is exercising extreme discretion and caution in describing its work. The project, underlines, contains no reverse-engineered code or Rockstar's proprietary code. It does not provide you with the game; you must dump your copy from the PSP hardware you actually own to provide resources. The recompiled program is what you will eventually get on GitHub, once you solve the latest performance issues. Take-Two spent years escaping against anything that touches its catalog, especially Grand Theft Auto: Vice City – a prequel pseudo-sequel to Grand Theft Auto VI. The company recently hit a splendid remaster fan that rebuilt Vice City in a newer engine with a DMCA takedown. He leveraged the modders so much that some realized they were hiding their ports as fake artificial intelligence videos just to pass the closing letters, and the company historically arrived at the process counter when someone was successful in filling them. The native execution of Vice City Stories on PC in 2026 is due to the work of a single fan, and it is necessary because Rockstar has left a gap of two decades where an official version should exist, even after having acquired a study dedicated exclusively to remasters and remakes, and historically made use of his lawyers whenever someone has succeeded in filling it. The good news is that this static recompiling will probably not be in difficulty, or at least, not so quickly as the decompilations of re3 and reVC. Natalia running this and putting it on GitHub could only be the beginning. Keeping the project there is the worrying question to which all those who would like to play Vice City Stories on their PC place at the moment. Considerando l’esperienza di GTA 5, dove il rilascio su PC è avvenuto circa un anno e mezzo dopo quello sulle console, mi convince poco che la gestione di Take-Two, notoriamente aggressiva verso qualsiasi modifica al proprio catalogo, si dimostri meno coriace a questo punto. Il fatto che abbiano già messo sotto pressione i modder per il remake di Vice City suggerisce una determinazione feroce; la DMCA takedown è solo l'inizio. E non sottovalutiamo la storia di Rockstar e le cause legali legate ai port engine, l’ultimo esempio è proprio quello di “Majora’s Mask”. Natalia sta agendo con estrema cautela, limitandosi a descrivere il suo lavoro senza promettere un accesso facile – questo è cruciale. Il software di ricompilazione, basato su un dump del codice dalla PSP, non è una violazione diretta dei diritti di Rockstar, ma l’accesso alle risorse necessarie (il dump della copia di Vice City Stories) è dove risiede il potenziale problema. La sua disponibilità su GitHub apre la porta a un'ulteriore esplosione di attività da parte dei fan, e mi aspetto che Take-Two monitori attentamente la situazione. Se questo progetto dovesse davvero funzionare su larga scala, si creerà un precedente interessante, una sorta di "versione fantasma" di Vice City Stories che potrebbe diventare un punto di riferimento per future conversioni non ufficiali. Non è escluso che, se la community riuscisse a farlo funzionare e in modo stabile, Rockstar cerchi, con mezzi legali o meno, di "ripulire" il progetto.

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