GTA1

The original Grand Theft Auto

You can download GTA1 for free from rockstargames.com/classics. You have to fill out a form and they email you the link. It's 328MB but about 300MB of that is CD Quality music. The music is great but it would be better if it was an optional download.

There is a compatibility problem with certain NVIDIA drivers. The graphics didn't display correctly on an NVIDIA 8800 that I tested. NVIDIA might have released new drivers that fix this problem. It works great on my ATi HD 3470.

You can work around some of the compatibility problems by running the Windows version in a Virtual machine like VirtualBox or VMWare. I've been told that the latest VMWare video driver runs GTA1 Windows version extremely well.

Q: Why are cop sounds played when I'm on foot?
A: The free classic version has the radio files named wrong. I think you have to open your GTA1 music folder, rename track1.wav to track11.wav, rename track10.wav to track1.wav and then rename track11.wav to track10.wav.

Q: Is there anything I can do to speed up singleplayer in the Windows GTA1?
A: In Windows XP, you can click start button > run > dxdiag > sound > change sound acceleration to basic or none (that option isn't in Vista/Win7).  Remember to change it back for other games.  Push F8 to turn the frame rate limiter on or off.   Push F11 to change resolution.

Q: GTA1 Windows version isn't compatible with some video cards. Is there a fix?
A: There isn't any fix that I know of but you could try running it in a virtual machine as mentioned above.

GTA1 development video from 1996!

OpenGTA - An open source clone of the GTA1 engine (written in C++ and SDL). You can walk around the GTA1 cities and fire some weapons but you can't drive cars yet and it's just singleplayer for now. Feel free to improve it.

GTAFixer.rar 23KB
The free version of GTA1 has some strange bug that corrupts PLAYER_A.DAT after the first run on some systems. Extract gtafixer.exe to your GTA1 folder and run it every time before you play GTA1. It changes a single byte in PLAYER_A.DAT and renames the music files to the correct filenames. GTA1 Launcher also fixes the PLAYER_A.DAT file.

GTA1 Game Finder - Steven Day created this over a year ago but very few people used it and now the default server is down, so it doesn't work anymore. The Java source code for the client and server are still available for any Java programmers who wish to revive it.

GTA1 cracked exe will run music from any audio CD and doesn't seem to have the player_a.dat problem. This exe doesn't support higher than 800x600 but since GTA1 just stretches 640x480, it doesn't really matter.

gta1patch.zip 385KB - This exe was taken from the free Rockstar Classics version of GTA1. It can only run music from the hard drive in the folder GTA\music, named track1.wav to track10.wav. It has the player_a.dat corruption bug. It supports resolutions higher than 800x600 but there's really no point using them since it just stretches low resolution images anyway.

GTA1 official manual 137KB. The manual that used to come with GTA1 retail, it's in PDF format

GTA1 scanned maps 3MB. These maps were scanned by ReplacementsDocs.com. They include the whole image and aren't cutoff like the ones released on CD with budget versions of GTA1.

GTA Wave 4.0 1.92MB, audio editor for GTA1 and GTA2 by Adrian Grucza. It can also export GTA3 sounds.

CityScape Data Structure (cds.doc) - Technical details of the GTA1 map format (.cmp) by DMA Design

Mission Template Description (mtd.doc) - GTA1 mission.ini documentation (must read for GTA1 mission makers)

GTA1 mods

Space Station Aftermath - GTA1 mod by illspirit

Snowball City - GTA1 mod by illspirit

GTA1 multiplayer bomb shops by Sektor - This enables the bomb shops in multiplayer.

GTA1, London 1961 and 1969 Multiplayer Notes:

There is an out of sync problem playing Windows 98 vs Windows XP. Whatever they used to seed the random city must have changed on XP. I have played GTA1 Vista vs XP and that worked fine.

Chat messages (F1-F4) work in the DOS version but they never appear on the Windows version. If you must chat during GTA1 then could use a third party voice chat program like Teamspeak or Ventrilo but it may slow down GTA1.

GTA1 works fine in true DOS with DOS network drivers but London 1969 and 1961 spit out the same error on all my machines if DOS network drivers are installed.

"GTA24 v11.5

(c) 1997 DMA Design Ltd

Error 17.12: Int 31 fn 301h call failed"

All the DOS versions work under Windows with the Windows IPX drivers (at least they did years ago when I tried).

The Windows version can't play against the DOS version and 24bit can't play 8bit. GTA London will connect to the GTA1 but it isn't going to work properly.