Last month, TheFlow surprised the PSVita community by announcing that he was able to port GTA San Andreas to the console but this port required some optimisations and improvements to be playable which started a new waiting game. Now, that is finally over as GTA San Andreas has been released for the Vita thanks to TheFlow, Rinnegatamante and aap!

What’s GTA San Andreas and what about the Vita port?

Thanks to excellent work by TheFlow, Rinnegatamante and aap, you can play GTA San Andreas on your Vita! (Source: VitaDB)

For those who don’t know what all the hype is about, GTA San Andreas is the fifth installment in the highly popular Grand Theft Auto series while also being the final ‘3D’ game in the series before GTA IV came out with improved ‘HD’ graphics. Released to overwhelmingly positive reviews in 2004, the game managed to become the best-selling game on the PlayStation 2 with it selling over 17 million copies on the console out of a combined sales total of above 27.5 million as of 2011.

Shifting attention to the PlayStation Vita port, it is based upon the Android version of the game as it runs its ARMv7 executable together with various patches and function substitutions in order to run on the PSVita. However, the port provides more than just a playable San Andreas experience as it also comes with some improvements/mods of its own namely:

• PlayStation 2-like rendering
• Fixed camera controls while flying vehicles
• Improved facial expressions on character models
• A fully-functional cheats hash key table
• The removal of specular lighting on pedestrians
• Support for PC version cheats using L+SELECT
• The L2/R2 buttons are mapped to the rear touchpad with L3/R3 being mapped to the bottom regions of the front touchscreen

This port also comes with a separate configuration application that is accessible from its LiveArea bubble allowing one to change various settings related to graphics rendering. Performance-wise, the game runs pretty well with a frame-rate close to 30FPS being maintained most of the time thanks to a good deal of optimisations primarily by Rinnegatamante.

Conclusion

As Grand Theft Auto San Andreas is not a free game, you must provide data files from the Android version of the game yourself. In order to do this, you can buy the game from the Play Store and then follow the instructions provided in the GitHub README below to get the files on your Vita.

GTA San Andreas for the Vita GitHub README (installation instruction and more information): https://github.com/TheOfficialFloW/gtasa_vita/blob/master/README.md

GTA San Andreas for the Vita download link: https://github.com/TheOfficialFloW/gtasa_vita/releases

Rinnegatamante’s Patreon (donations): https://www.patreon.com/Rinnegatamante

TheFlow’s Patreon (donations): https://www.patreon.com/TheOfficialFloW