Enthusiast Epic0522 has released the REGTA project, porting three Grand Theft Auto titles to the New Nintendo 3DS series. The project integrates and updates native ports of Grand Theft Auto III, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, and Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories.
The three games run based on the decompiled engines re3, reVC, and the previously discontinued fan project reStories. Epic0522 redesigned the user interface, moving the minimap, health, armor, and system notifications to the bottom touch screen, allowing the top screen to focus on displaying the game visuals. The bottom screen's color scheme changes depending on the title and can be used to simulate L3/R3 buttons or manually adjust the camera angle.
REGTA only supports the New Nintendo 3DS, New Nintendo 3DS XL, and New Nintendo 2DS XL; the original Nintendo 3DS, Nintendo 3DS XL, and Nintendo 2DS are not compatible. Epic0522 stated that the relevant engines require the 804MHz processor frequency, L2 cache, and larger memory space provided by the New series.
The project also fixed several graphical and stability issues. Motion blur in Grand Theft Auto III, the clock hands on the Staunton Island tower, and vehicle glass transparency have been corrected; water seams, character model geometry errors, and engine glitches when flying helicopters in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City have also been addressed.
Among the three titles, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City currently has the worst performance. Complex scenes suffer from noticeable frame drops, there are brief delays in audio loading, and generating the native texture cache on first launch can take up to 40 minutes.
Progress has also been made on the port of Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories, with mission scripts, cutscenes, and destruction effects in the Staunton Island area restored, along with simplified reflections for vehicles. Epic0522 mentioned that he has completed the main story from start to finish on a physical New Nintendo 3DS, but side missions and 100% completion still require further testing.
Epic0522 has currently only published the source code on GitHub, without providing installation packages or copyrighted game assets. Players need to use devkitARM release 55 to compile CIA or 3DSX files themselves and extract assets from the PC original; soundtracks can also be converted from the PlayStation 2 versions.