GTA1

The original Grand Theft Auto

You can work around some of the compatibility problems by running the Windows version in a Virtual machine like VirtualBox or VMWare. The DOS version works in DOSBox.

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: How to fix corrupt graphics in GTA1/London 1961/London 1969 Windows versions?
A: You can use old drivers or try renaming the exe to “Grand Theft Auto.exe”, this will may enable a work around for a driver texture bug.

M1Win, Junction25 map editors and various other GTA1 tools

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
On some systems, GTA1 has a bug that corrupts PLAYER_A.DAT after the first run. 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 free version music files to the correct filenames. GTA1 Launcher also fixes the PLAYER_A.DAT file.

GTA1 Game Finder – Steven Day created this in 2007 but very few people used it and now the default server is down, so it doesn’t work any more. The Java source code for the client and server are still available for any Java programmers who wish to revive it.

GTA1 INI Pad mission editor for GTA1. Created by Jernej.

GTA1 modified executable will run music from any audio CD. This exe doesn’t support higher than 800×600 but since GTA1 just stretches 640×480, it doesn’t really matter. This is usually the best executable to use.

GTA1 London 1961 no cd exe – 1961 isn’t compatible with some retail versions of the London CD since they changed the layout of the disc. This exe should work around that issue. This requires GTA1, London 1969 and 1961 to already be installed.

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 800×600 but there’s really no point using them since it just stretches low resolution images anyway.

GTA1 official manual 188KB. 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

Las Vegas, Venezia and Machine GTA1 mod created by RoLaND

Space Station Aftermath GTA1 mod created by illspirit

Snowball City GTA1 mod created by illspirit

GTA1 multiplayer bomb shops created 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.

67 thoughts on “GTA1”

  1. You know how do the GTA London radio works? I attempt to install the music files in the same way that GTA 1 music files, but don’t work. Help me please!

  2. Hello, is there a way to get the retail Windows version of GTA, London 1969 and 1961 working without the CD? I have a working game and a Music folder with the .wav files in my install directory but it will not play any music, just sound effects.

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