GTA IV on the Web

Grand Theft Auto IV (Xbox 360) running in a web browser: the real game, recompiled to WebAssembly, drawn with WebGPU, played from your own copy of the disc.

Built on Liberty Recompiled, LibertyRecompAndroid and the PS5 port

This is the work of OZORDI (Liberty Recompiled, the native recompilation of GTA IV), vaduur (LibertyRecompAndroid) and elripalda (the PS5 port and its hub), with ReXGlue underneath. The web port by itzzace takes all of that into the browser.

Go star the original projects and support them.

Play it

You need your own GTA IV for the USA Xbox 360. No game files come with this.

1. Install Python 3 (on Windows, tick Add python.exe to PATH) and Chrome or Edge.
2. Download gta4-web-<version>.zip from Releases and unzip it.
3. Put your game files in its game-files folder:

   File	Size
   The USA Xbox 360 disc as an .iso, for example Grand Theft Auto IV (USA) (En,Fr,De,Es,It).iso	7,835,492,352 bytes
   Title Update 8: TU_1A581VI_000000K000000.0000000000205	3,715,072 bytes

4. Double-click Play GTA IV (Play GTA IV.command on a Mac: right-click it and pick Open the first time; Play GTA IV.bat on Windows). The game opens in your browser at http://localhost:8765/.

The first start installs the game into the browser, which takes a few minutes and about 8 GB of space. After that it starts in seconds. Keep the small window that opens running while you play, and close it to stop.

Controls: WASD and the mouse, Enter and Esc in menus, or plug in a controller. F8 shows the FPS counter, and the buttons in the top right switch to fullscreen.

Saves live in your browser. Back them up from the hub's Saves page (Download Saves), and bring 360 saves over with Import Xbox 360 Saves.

If it doesn't start

• Use Chrome or Edge on a computer with about 8 GB of free memory. Safari, Firefox and iPhone / iPad browsers can't run it yet. While the game's window is open, http://localhost:8765/check.html shows what your browser is missing.
• "No disc image found" means the .iso isn't in game-files. Only the USA Xbox 360 disc works, not PC, PS3 or other editions.
• Stuck installing? Keep the tab in front: browsers slow down background tabs.
• Play from another device on your Wi-Fi (experimental, the server on a Mac for now): start it with GTA4_WEB_LAN=1 python3 play.py and open the setup address it prints on the other device, which walks you through trusting the certificate once. Phones and tablets mostly can't run the game yet: check them with check.html first.

What's in it

• GTA IV running in Chrome, Edge or another Chromium browser, from WebAssembly (64-bit memory, threads) and WebGPU
• The game's own Xbox 360 shaders converted to WGSL, with the 360's display gamma, so it looks like the console: checked frame by frame against a recording of the Xbox 360
• Unzip, drop in your disc image, double-click: it installs into the browser's storage once, then starts from there
• The PS5 port's hub in the browser: Home, Display, Game, Episodes, Saves, Achievements and About
• Keyboard and mouse, or a controller, with button prompts for PlayStation, Xbox 360, Xbox One / Series and Switch pads, and readable keyboard keycaps
• The pause menu's Controls page drawn for each controller, and for the keyboard on foot and in a vehicle, put into your own copy of the game's menu textures when it installs
• Saves kept in your browser, with Download Saves, Load Saves From a File and Xbox 360 save import (each player picks their own files)
• A loading screen with install progress, a Fullscreen button and an FPS counter (F8)
• Play from a phone or tablet on your Wi-Fi, served from your own computer (experimental), with a device check page

Screenshots

The pause menu's Controls page, redrawn for each controller and the keyboard:

Building

To run it from a build instead of a release: python3 web/scripts/play.py "<disc image>" "<title update>" from the repository's folder, once web/build/link is built.

The web build lives in web/:

• web/scripts: the page (index.html, scene3d.js for the 3D renderer, webui.js for the hub's overlays, gameinput.js), the server and the build scripts. Copy them into web/build and run them from there.
• web/shaders: the tools that turn the game's shaders into WGSL.
• web/thirdparty: the third-party libraries' Emscripten build (web/build-tp).
• The game-side changes are in glue/rexglue-sdk-main (search for [web port] and __EMSCRIPTEN__), most of them in gta4-recomp/src/web/ and src/graphics/web_frame_capture.cpp.

You need Emscripten (EMSDK_DIR, by default next to this repository), then web/scripts/rebuild.sh compiles the game code, the runtime and the glue and links web/build/link/gta4.wasm. The Controls pictures are drawn by tools/xtd_tools/build_controller_diagrams.py and stored as the pictures alone (LibertyRecompLib/private/button_prompts/*/controller.bin): the game puts them into the player's own frontend_360.xtd (rpf_button_prompts.cpp). web/scripts/make-release.sh <version> makes the release zip. The build is a work in progress and its steps are still rough.

The PS5 build, its hub and its packaging are as the PS5 port has them: see README-PS5.md and ps5/BUILD.md.

Credits

• itzzace: the web port: the WebAssembly and WebGPU build, the renderer, display gamma, controls, keyboard prompts, controller pictures, saves, loading screen and Wi-Fi play
• OZORDI: Liberty Recompiled, the GTA IV recompilation this is built on, with its contributors
• vaduur: LibertyRecompAndroid, the fork the PS5 port starts from
• elripalda: the PS5 port, the hub, the PlayStation buttons and the art
• ReXGlue: the static recompiler and runtime, which builds on Xenia and XenonRecomp
• ThirteenAG: FusionFix, whose shaders and camera options the hub uses
• Emscripten, naga, SDL3, Dear ImGui, FFmpeg, stb, dr_libs, and the TeX Gyre Heros, Oswald and Inter fonts
• Everyone credited in the PS5 port's README

License

Liberty Recompiled, LibertyRecompAndroid, the PS5 port and this web port are under the GPL-3.0. ReXGlue keeps its own BSD-style license (glue/rexglue-sdk-main/LICENSE), and the third-party libraries keep theirs. None of these cover the game, its artwork or its music.

An unofficial fan project, not affiliated with or endorsed by Rockstar Games, Take-Two Interactive, Microsoft or Sony. Grand Theft Auto and all related names belong to their owners. No game files are included: you need your own copy of GTA IV for Xbox 360. The screenshots are of the game running in this port.