William Bokunic’s Weblog

The Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas Multiplayer Mod (SA-MP) is the most widely known mod of any GTA game. It allows you to play San Andreas online with other players. Many hail it as being better online than GTA 4 (possibly because you have have up to 200 players on a single server versus 32 for GTA 4). The problem is that SA-MP only supports version 1.0 of San Andreas. All retail copies come with version 2.0. For them, however, a downgrade patch is available. But what about Steam users who have version 3.0 installed?

Finding myself in that boat I decided to search around for an option. After a week of searching I came across a solution in a forum posting. It wasn’t clear though so I’m going to explain in detail how to use SA-MP with the steam version of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas.

It’s actually quite simple. Find a no CD crack for version 1.0 of the game. These are legal. Go to this link to get one:

GTA: San Andreas No-CD Cracks

Next drag that exe file into your San Andreas steam folder located in ~/Steam/steamapps/common/. Make sure it is named “GTA_SA.” When you go to install SA-MP you won’t be able to install to the default location. Browse for the steam folder location again and use that (you’ll have to do this once again after you launch SA-MP, but this is the last time).

Now you should be able to play SA-MP! Note that you may run into a few bugs, but nothing too bad.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 20th, 2009 at 5:05 pm and is filed under Gaming, How To. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.