How Tos

How to mod Grand Theft Auto 3 for iPhone and iPad without a jailbreak

Drive the Batmobile in GTA 3, and other hacks

How to mod Grand Theft Auto 3 for iPhone and iPad without a jailbreak

Wily tinkerers have recently figured out how to hack Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto 3, letting you install mods into this 10th Anniversary remake.

Because the iOS adaptation is a port of the crime sim's PC edition, you can install pretty much any modification from the web.

This lets you play as Ronald McDonald, turn the Cheetah sports car into a Porsche Carrera, swap out guns, and replace buildings.

To show you how it's done, we're going to turn the stuffy old Idaho saloon car into a jet black 1989 Batmobile on our non-jailbroken iPad 2. Follow along, and you'll have all you need to know to tweak Grand Theft Auto 3 to your heart's content.

First up, we need to choose our mod. There are lots of websites out there where you can find downloadable packages for Grand Theft Auto 3, but we recommend starting out with GameFront, The GTA Place, GTAinside, and Planet Grand Theft Auto. Like we said, we're going to put the Batmobile in Liberty City. This one, made by "J@Ke", replaces the Idaho. It also lets you fire rockets if you really tweak the game, though for the sake of simplicity, we'll stick to a model and texture swap for now. Download the files (in this case, they're called "idaho.dff" and "idaho.txd"), and store them somewhere safe. how-to-mod-gta-3-step-1
Now, we need a program called iExplorer (available on Windows and Mac). This lets you fiddle with (some of) the files on your iPhone or iPad, even if you haven't jailbroken your gadget.

Just in case it wasn't obvious, we take no responsibility for the messing up of your device during this process.

Plug in your device and load iExplorer. Choose the iOS device with the Grand Theft Auto 3 app installed on it and open the following folders: 'Apps'> 'gta 3'> 'gta3.app'. In this folder, you'll find all the files for the game, but the ones we're looking for are "gta3_pvr.dir" and "gta3_pvr.img", which hold a complete record of all the models in the game and their textures. This is what we want to edit. Copy them onto your hard drive (by dragging and dropping them into Windows Explorer / Finder). Just to be safe, make a backup (by copy and pasting them, and giving them a name like "gta3-backup.img"). Finally, delete the originals off of your iOS device by clicking the delete button in iExplorer).
how-to-mod-gta-3-step-2
Now download IMG Tool (Windows only, though runs fine on Mac with handy emulator Crossover), which is a bespoke program for fiddling with Grand Theft Auto 3's files. Click 'file', then 'load', then choose the "gta3_pvr.img" that we copied off of our iOS device in the last step. Give it a second - the few-thousand models and textures that make up Liberty City will eventually appear in a big list. Find the car you want to replace (in our case, it's the Idaho, so let's hit 'edit', then find and type 'Idaho' to whizz down the list), and you'll find "idaho.dff" and "idaho.txd". Select them and delete them. Now, click 'commands', then add and find the "idaho.dff" and "idaho.txd" of the Batmobile that we downloaded in the first step. This will plop them in the list. Finally, click 'commands' and 'Rebuild Archive' to finish up. how-to-mod-gta-3-step-3
Time to put our modified files back onto our iOS gizmo. Plug it back in, open iExplorer, and navigate back to the "gta3.app" folder from Step 2. Drag your new "gta3_pvr.dir" and "gta3_pvr.img" files into this folder. This might take a little while, especially if your device is chock-full of apps and music, so give it a chance to do its work. And we're done. Quit iExplore, unplug your iOS device, and slide to unlock. how-to-mod-gta-3-step-4
Load up the app. If you did everything right, you should find the game loading up perfectly without any crashes or performance hits. Now, we just need to find the car we replaced. The Idaho is a pretty typical vehicle, so just drive around and find it. If all goes well, you should see a Batmobile coming over the horizon! It's got some slight strangeness to its mesh, but that's to be expected when putting a PC mod on an iPhone. Some mods will work better than others. You can try other things if you're feeling brave. Weapon mods, building swaps, cheats, and hacks. Not everything is going to work, but as long as you've got your backup, you'll be fine. If something goes wrong, just rename the backup files to their old name and drop them into iExplorer. how-to-mod-gta-3-step-5

Mark Brown
Mark Brown
Mark Brown is editor at large of Pocket Gamer