Vice City Stories Recomp

GTA Vice City Stories for PC

A native Windows and macOS build of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories (PSP, Rockstar London, 2006), made by statically recompiling the original game code to x64 and running it on a reimplementation of the PSP's Allegrex CPU and Graphics Engine (the PSPRecomp framework).

It is not an emulator running the game code: the game's MIPS program is translated to C++ ahead of time and compiled into a normal executable. On top of that this project adds a keyboard and mouse scheme with proper mouse look, widescreen and multi-aspect-ratio support, a Vulkan graphics stack (SMAA, FXAA, colour grading, sky palette, volumetric clouds, an optional high-resolution texture pack), and a settings launcher.

This repository and its releases contain no game data. You need your own copy of the game, with its executable decrypted outside this project. Nothing here is affiliated with or endorsed by Rockstar Games, Take-Two Interactive or Sony.

Status: playable release. The game boots, plays and holds 60 fps on a desktop GPU; see Known issues before reporting a problem.

Download and play

1. Open the Releases page of this repository and download the latest VCSNative-Windows.zip.
2. Unzip the whole VCSNative folder somewhere you can write to (not Program Files). It contains two programs:
   • VCSNative.exe: the game.
   • VCSLauncher.exe: a settings window with a Play button; keep it next to the game.
3. Have your game files ready in a folder called PSP_DATA, containing PSP_GAME\SYSDIR\EBOOT_DECRYPTED.ELF and PSP_GAME\USRDIR. Put it next to the two exes, or pick it in the launcher: the game data can live anywhere, including an external drive, and nothing is copied.
4. Double-click VCSLauncher.exe and press Play. If Windows shows "Windows protected your PC", choose More info and then Run anyway.

That is all: no installer, nothing else to download, no extra runtime to install. The Visual C++ runtime and the FFmpeg libraries are inside the folder.

Settings are written to VCSNative.ini and ProperShaders.ini next to the game; both are editable by hand and the launcher preserves comments and layout.

Requirements

• Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit, with a Vulkan 1.1 driver (the standard NVIDIA, AMD or Intel driver includes one)
• A CPU with AVX2, FMA, BMI1/BMI2, LZCNT, F16C, MOVBE and POPCNT. The game checks at startup and tells you which one is missing instead of crashing
• macOS 13 or later on Apple Silicon for the Mac build
• The game is limited by the processor, not the graphics card. On a Ryzen 7 5800X3D a frame costs about 7 ms of CPU with the frame limiter off

macOS

Unzip VCSNative-macOS.zip, double-click VCSNative and choose your PSP_DATA folder on the Window page. The app is self-contained (FFmpeg, SDL, the Vulkan loader and MoltenVK are inside it). Settings, saves and textures live in ~/Library/Application Support/VCSNative.

What is in it

Keyboard and mouse	Full keyboard and mouse controls with raw mouse look: accumulated per frame, no smoothing, no acceleration. The cursor stays inside the game window. The game's own on-screen prompts show your keys and mouse buttons instead of PSP symbols, and switch to Xbox button names when you pick up a controller.
60 fps, evenly spaced	The vblank clock is paced to 59.94 Hz against a 60 Hz display, with audio used as a second reference so long scenes do not drift. Frame pacing holds p99 around 18 ms in busy areas.
Any aspect ratio	Correct framing and HUD layout at 16:9, 21:9, 32:9, 4:3, 16:10, 5:4 and tall windows, windowed or fullscreen, and the picture follows live resizes. Optional integer scaling and aspect-preserving letterboxing.
Vulkan graphics stack	Hardware transform and culling, GPU texture uploads that do not stall the game, display-list recording on its own thread, SMAA (three-pass) or FXAA, bloom, colour grading, sky palette remap, dither, contrast adaptive sharpening and CloudWorks volumetric clouds. Most of it is switchable in the launcher.
Texture pack	An optional, separate download: 7,000 plus upscaled game and HUD textures, installed and uninstalled from the launcher's Quality page, with a VRAM-aware memory budget.
Camera options	Camera on right stick, invert Y, mouse sensitivity and an adjustable on-foot look-up limit.
Audio fixes	Correct ATRAC3+ playback (cutscene dialogue was silent or double-speed without it), a resampler that follows the hardware clock, and a drift guard that drops stale audio instead of letting it fall further behind.
Draw distance	World and model detail sliders, with the values that make vehicles despawn blocked in the launcher.
Project2DFX lights	Distant vehicle and street lights drawn beyond the game's own LOD cutoff.
Settings launcher	Window, Rendering, Quality, Controls, Addons and Performance pages. It also reports your display refresh rate and warns when it is not a multiple of 60.

Known issues

• Bloom is composited on the CPU, so it only has a visible effect when frame presentation is set to CPU readback. With the default GPU swapchain it stays off.
• Missions and save games have had less testing than the opening areas. Please attach VCSNative.log to any report.
• Untested hardware paths: multiple monitors with mixed DPI, HDR displays, Optimus or PowerXpress laptops, and AMD and Intel GPUs (developed on NVIDIA).
• No HDR or wide-gamut output.
• Frame pacing on a display running at something other than 60/120 Hz can look uneven without variable refresh rate; the launcher says so on its Performance page.
• The PSP's analog stick "hold" behavior in some mini-games is mapped to the keys as configured and has not been compared against the original button-for-button.

How it works

PSPRecomp reads the decrypted MIPS executable, analyzes its functions and control flow, emits C++ translation units for the guest code, and links them into a native host runtime. There is no interpreter and no JIT at run time. The recompiler framework and the game profile are separated: the title-specific addresses, HLE behaviour and generated code all live under profiles/vcs, and the framework builds without any profile selected. See docs/ARCHITECTURE.md.

Building from source

See BUILDING.md. The short version: Visual Studio 2022 with the ClangCL toolset, CMake and the Vulkan SDK on Windows, then profiles\vcs\BUILD_VCS.bat followed by profiles\vcs\scripts\package_release.bat.

Creating another profile

The framework is reusable. See docs/PROFILE_GUIDE.md.

Credits

• Jessica Natalia (@jessicanataliagta) created PSPRecomp, the VCS profile and the DirectX 12 host this build stands on. The recompiler framework and the game profile itself are her work.
• FFmpeg (LGPL 2.1 or later), SMAA, Project2DFX light data and behaviour reference, CloudWorks volumetric cloud model, stb. See profiles/vcs/THIRD_PARTY.md and docs/SOURCE_PROVENANCE.md.

License

The PSPRecomp framework code is distributed under the MIT License; see LICENSE. Individual profile components keep their own licences and notices.