GTA Vice City (reVC) — Raspberry Pi 5

Optimized native port of reVC for the Raspberry Pi 5.
Built for aarch64, Debian Trixie / Raspberry Pi OS (64-bit), 16 KB kernel pages, and VideoCore VII.

Intro

This repository is a Pi 5–only fork. It uses the reverse-engineered reVC engine with librw (OpenGL / OpenGL ES via GLFW) and OpenAL Soft audio.

Upstream reVC supports many platforms; this fork targets Raspberry Pi 5 only.

How it was achieved

• Cortex-A76 optimization — -mcpu=cortex-a76 -O3 -ffast-math -ftree-vectorize
• 16 KB page support — -Wl,-z,max-page-size=0x4000 at link time (Pi 5 kernel_2712 default)
• VideoCore VII GPU shaders — mediump precision and early alpha discard in vendor/librw/src/gl/shaders/ and src/extras/shaders/
• OpenGL / librw / GLFW — linux-arm64-librw_gl3_glfw-oal target; Wayland and X11 via system libglfw3
• OpenAL audio — system OpenAL Soft
• .deb packaging — revc-pi5 installs the binary, launcher, gamefiles/ overrides, and a Games menu entry

Prerequisites

IMPORTANT: This package does not include game assets. You must own a copy of GTA Vice City on PC.

Copy your owned PC install files (models, data, audio, gta-vc.exe, etc.) to the Pi, or point the launcher at an existing folder on first run.

Installation

Download the latest .deb from Releases:

wget https://github.com/chronic8000/revc-pi5/releases/download/v1.0-1/revc-pi5_1.0-1_arm64.deb
sudo apt install ./revc-pi5_1.0-1_arm64.deb

This installs:

Path	Purpose
/usr/bin/revc-pi5	Launcher (first-run folder picker)
/usr/lib/revc-pi5/reVC	Game binary
/usr/lib/revc-pi5/gamefiles/	Shipped overrides (controller DB, neo tuning, etc.)
/usr/share/applications/revc-pi5.desktop	Start Menu → Games entry

Usage

• First launch — select your GTA Vice City PC folder (saved to ~/.config/revc/gamepath)
• Launch — Start Menu → Games → GTA Vice City
• Settings — reVC.ini in your game folder (debug menu: Ctrl+M)
• Controllers — Xbox / PlayStation pads via GLFW
• Remove — sudo apt remove revc-pi5 (does not delete your game files or saves)

Build from source (on the Pi)

Native compilation on the Pi is recommended over cross-compiling.

git clone https://github.com/chronic8000/revc-pi5.git
cd revc-pi5

Install build dependencies:

sudo apt install build-essential git libglfw3-dev libgl1-mesa-dev \
  libopenal-dev libmpg123-dev libsndfile1-dev libx11-dev libwayland-dev \
  libxkbcommon-dev dpkg-dev zenity imagemagick uuid-dev

premake5 is not always in apt on Trixie. Install a matching aarch64 premake5 release, or build it:

git clone --depth 1 --branch v5.0.0-beta7 https://github.com/premake/premake-core.git
cd premake-core && make -f Bootstrap.mak linux
sudo cp bin/release/premake5 /usr/local/bin/

Build:

./packaging/pi5/build-native.sh

Output:

bin/linux-arm64-librw_gl3_glfw-oal/Release/reVC

Build a .deb:

./packaging/pi5/make-deb.sh
sudo apt install ./revc-pi5_1.0-1_arm64.deb

Pi OS Lite / kiosk setups

reVC is a native Linux OpenGL app. It needs direct GPU access and a Wayland or X11 session.

It will not run inside a QEMU + VNC Windows kiosk (e.g. Cage → vncviewer → Windows 11). That stack only displays the VM.

For temporary native testing on a kiosk Pi:

# Stop Windows VM kiosk, run reVC on HDMI (GPU / gbm renderer)
./packaging/pi5/switch-to-revc.sh

# Restore Windows kiosk when done (VM disk is not modified)
./packaging/pi5/switch-to-win11.sh

Stopping QEMU only ends the running VM in RAM — your disk.qcow2 is not deleted or corrupted.

Packaging layout

packaging/pi5/
  build-native.sh       # Pi 5 native build (A76 flags, 16 KB pages, LTO)
  regenerate-shaders.sh # Rebuild embedded GLSL .inc files
  make-deb.sh           # Build revc-pi5_1.0-1_arm64.deb
  revc-pi5-launcher     # Installed as /usr/bin/revc-pi5
  launch_revc_kiosk.sh  # Cage kiosk launcher (optional)
  revc-kiosk.service    # systemd unit for HDMI kiosk testing (optional)
  switch-to-revc.sh     # Swap Win11 kiosk → reVC
  switch-to-win11.sh    # Restore Win11 kiosk
packaging/debian/
  control               # .deb metadata
  revc-pi5.desktop      # Freedesktop launcher

To-Do

• Further kiosk / GLES profiling on Pi 5
• Fix physics for high FPS (upstream reVC)

Upstream

Based on GTAmodding/re3 (miami branch — GTA Vice City).
Game engine improvements, rendering features, and modding notes live in the upstream README.

License

We don't feel like we're in a position to give this code a license.
The code should only be used for educational, documentation and modding purposes.
We do not encourage piracy or commercial use.
Please keep derivate work open source and give proper credit.

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Created with <3 for the Raspberry Pi community.