matrix-cat
Member
All this GTA V buzz has me frothing at the mouth with a sense of joy and wonderment that I thought GTA IV had crushed out of me. I threw in my PS2 copy of San Andreas to catch up with my old 100% save file from 2005, but man that game has not aged well. The draw distance is laughable and it still only manages about 20FPS on a good day. I needed a version of SA that matched up with the way I 'remember' it looking back in the day, so I spent about an hour today trying to make the Steam version playable and eventually had some success.
The first thing you'll note upon starting up your new Steam version is that it has no widescreen options. These were apparently patched out during the Hot Coffee scandal, for some reason, so step 1 is to downgrade to v1.0. This is also necessary to run any mods for the game, but for now we just want to play this vidjagame.
Step 2: controlling the thing. Of course your 360 controller isn't going to come close to working straight out of the box, so we need a tool called San Andreas Advanced Controls (SAAC v1.2). This probably won't work if you're on Windows 7, so you'll need a couple of .dlls that are most easily procured with this thing here. Run that, start up SAAC and configure yourself a control scheme. I don't remember how SA controlled for the life of me, but it was easy enough to make it feel like a modernish left trigger/right trigger sort of game.
Now you're almost ready to play, except for the game's frame limiter. This is on by default, and it limits the game to 25FPS. Turning it off leads to screen tearing and weird glitches, so we'll need a thing that raises the limit. You'll have to have the game running before you start it, and it needs to be run every time you start the game up, but it works pretty well.
If you did all that, well, it probably still won't work because PC gaming, but maybe you'll get lucky. I should say that I'm just some putz who did some googling and all credit goes to the much cleverer people who made all that stuff. I still can't seem to get a proper 16:10 aspect ratio and the draw distance is still awful, but at least it's ready to play.
It's amazing how quickly it all comes back. I still know Los Santos like the back of my hand, and I remember all the songs and all the flavour dialogue from the radio hosts. I still remember ol' Timmy Tommy Nightmare Smitty and all the words to Amos Moses. You can still jump the airport wall to get a plane right at the start of the game, and if you can dodge a few missiles you're just a Pay and Spray away from exploring the whole state. I estimate I'll get about three missions in before I have to download a God Mode trainer because I don't think I could ever go back to missions without checkpoints. I'd forgotten all about the RPG-lite elements and how skinny CJ was at the start of the game, and I'm falling off my motorbikes every time someone looks at me funny
Otherwise, this game's still just as amazing as always. I think I put about 200 hours into the PS2 version, but I just want to fall right into it all over again.
The first thing you'll note upon starting up your new Steam version is that it has no widescreen options. These were apparently patched out during the Hot Coffee scandal, for some reason, so step 1 is to downgrade to v1.0. This is also necessary to run any mods for the game, but for now we just want to play this vidjagame.
Step 2: controlling the thing. Of course your 360 controller isn't going to come close to working straight out of the box, so we need a tool called San Andreas Advanced Controls (SAAC v1.2). This probably won't work if you're on Windows 7, so you'll need a couple of .dlls that are most easily procured with this thing here. Run that, start up SAAC and configure yourself a control scheme. I don't remember how SA controlled for the life of me, but it was easy enough to make it feel like a modernish left trigger/right trigger sort of game.
Now you're almost ready to play, except for the game's frame limiter. This is on by default, and it limits the game to 25FPS. Turning it off leads to screen tearing and weird glitches, so we'll need a thing that raises the limit. You'll have to have the game running before you start it, and it needs to be run every time you start the game up, but it works pretty well.
If you did all that, well, it probably still won't work because PC gaming, but maybe you'll get lucky. I should say that I'm just some putz who did some googling and all credit goes to the much cleverer people who made all that stuff. I still can't seem to get a proper 16:10 aspect ratio and the draw distance is still awful, but at least it's ready to play.
It's amazing how quickly it all comes back. I still know Los Santos like the back of my hand, and I remember all the songs and all the flavour dialogue from the radio hosts. I still remember ol' Timmy Tommy Nightmare Smitty and all the words to Amos Moses. You can still jump the airport wall to get a plane right at the start of the game, and if you can dodge a few missiles you're just a Pay and Spray away from exploring the whole state. I estimate I'll get about three missions in before I have to download a God Mode trainer because I don't think I could ever go back to missions without checkpoints. I'd forgotten all about the RPG-lite elements and how skinny CJ was at the start of the game, and I'm falling off my motorbikes every time someone looks at me funny
Otherwise, this game's still just as amazing as always. I think I put about 200 hours into the PS2 version, but I just want to fall right into it all over again.
