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GTA VI launches on

A white Dreamcast and controller on a desk, hooked up to a monitor showing Claude walking down a Liberty City street in GTA III.

GTA III on Dreamcast: the DCA3 fan port runs on real hardware

DCA3 delivers the GTA III Dreamcast version DMA Design shelved in 2000. It runs on a stock console, is built on re3 and needs your own PC copy of the game.

This article is from December 25, 2024. Some details may have changed since then.

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On December 25, 2024, the DCA3 alpha went live: an unofficial port of GTA III for the Sega Dreamcast. It runs on an unmodified console (16 MB of RAM, 8 MB of video memory) and saves to the VMU. It comes from a group of homebrew developers led by skmp, and the neat part is that it finishes, 24 years late, something DMA Design (now Rockstar North) actually started.

The GTA III that almost happened

GTA III feels like a PlayStation 2 game through and through, but it didn't begin that way. Obbe Vermeij, one of the original programmers, said as much in September 2024 after seeing early footage of the port:

"The first months of development of gta3 (back in 99/00) were done on the Dreamcast. For commercial reasons, we switched to ps2. At the time, we did think it was technically possible to pull it off on the DC, and these guys are actually doing it."

Sega discontinued the console in 2001, the same year GTA III arrived on PS2, so a Dreamcast version never shipped. DCA3 proves Vermeij right: the hardware could handle Liberty City.

Claude raising a fist on a Portland street at night, with GTA III's radar and HUD, in the Dreamcast port.

How DCA3 works

The port didn't start from scratch. It's built on re3, the reverse-engineering project that rebuilt GTA III's source code as readable C++. The team took that code, moved it onto KallistiOS, the open-source Dreamcast development kit, and rewrote large parts of the renderer around the console's hardware.

Details

Status

Alpha, released December 25, 2024

Hardware

Stock Dreamcast: 16 MB RAM, 8 MB VRAM

Performance

Around 24 fps in most situations

Saves

On the VMU

Controllers

Standard pad, plus adapters such as BlueRetro and USB4Maple

Requirement

A PC copy of GTA III: the game's assets come from your own files

Early builds only ran on a Dreamcast upgraded to 32 MB of video memory. Getting it onto a stock unit meant compressing and downsizing textures and reworking how the city streams in, with help from SWAT, PH3NOM (dynamic lighting and streaming), jaxyn b, Esppiral and Iridon, plus Frogbull, the developer behind a Metal Gear Solid 2 tech demo on the same console.

Claude next to the Dodo plane on the runway at Liberty City's Francis International Airport in DCA3 on Dreamcast.

What still needs work

It's an alpha, and it shows. Some missions have minor bugs and there are occasional crashes. The weakest link is disc streaming: Liberty City loads continuously, and the GD-ROM drive struggles to keep up, so it plays better from an optical drive emulator. The team reckons six more months of full-time optimization could get it to a locked 30 fps. The upcoming beta will focus on bug fixes and faster CD streaming.

DCA3 ships with none of Rockstar's files: every player has to convert the assets from their own PC copy of GTA III while building the disc image. That matters, because re3 has a long legal history. Take-Two had it pulled from GitHub with a DMCA notice in February 2021 and sued its developers that September. The case ended in April 2023, when the publisher dismissed its claims against the four named defendants with prejudice, meaning they can't be refiled, after a settlement whose terms weren't disclosed.

re3 and reVC, its Vice City counterpart, have lived on through mirrors and forks ever since, and they power nearly every fan port of the classic trilogy: Switch, PS Vita, Wii U and now Dreamcast. Everyone sticks to the same rule: the code belongs to the community, but the game has to be yours.

Why it matters

Beyond the nostalgia, DCA3 is a small piece of alternate history. Rockstar re-released the trilogy in 2021 as The Definitive Edition, and the reception was rough enough that it ended up issuing an apology. Meanwhile, fans keep finding ways to preserve the original game and bring it to machines it should have been on all along. If there's a Dreamcast gathering dust in a drawer somewhere, here's a reason to dig it out.