GTA San Andreas doesn't launch on Windows 11

[Szymon7022]

Hello there.
GTA San Andreas worked perfectly fine for me on Windows 10, yes ? After I upgraded to Windows 11, the game just can't launch now though. The proccess just stops after two seconds or so. I downgraded the game when I was still using Windows 10 and it worked, it just did. The steam version worked ok too. But after the installation of Windows 11, both versions just stopped working for no reason. And I tried deleting the gta_sa.set file, trying out every compatibility mode, updating the graphics drivers and nothing really worked. When I tried to launch the downgraded version, nothing just happened, but to my surprise, the Steam version displayed something different - not enough space for thread data. But what does that exactly mean ? My graphics card is RTX 2060 with 6 GB of memory and I have 16 GB of RAM and I have more than enough disk space to do everything. Does someone know how to fix that ? I still want to have a working instance of the old San Andreas, because the remasters are not exactly good. And how does that even work that Vice City and III work perfectly on Windows 11, but not SA ?
Please help me with solving the issue, because I think that I've tried everything that could work. I even tried using the compact exe to no avail.
Regards and have a nice day.

[Ken]

Although I don't have experience of win 11, u may try compatibility mode on its exe file.
win xp, vista, 7,8, there r many, u can try them one by one. Worth trying.

[SirJarko]

Thats really weird, I have all 3 and they work great on my rig, Each version I have of the games is a custom version I made thats a combo of the XBox, PC, PS2 good stuff without any of the bad and staying true to the OG releases, Kinda like if the games were released today. Maybe something you could try is I upload the version of SA I still play and replace your files with my GTA SA version and see if that works?

[Szymon7022]

Originally posted by Ken:

Although I don't have experience of win 11, u may try compatibility mode on its exe file.
win xp, vista, 7,8, there r many, u can try them one by one. Worth trying.

As I said, I've already tried that and that didn't work.

[Ken]

Originally posted by Szymon7022:

Originally posted by Ken:

Although I don't have experience of win 11, u may try compatibility mode on its exe file.
win xp, vista, 7,8, there r many, u can try them one by one. Worth trying.

As I said, I've already tried that and that didn't work.

Remove the saved games folder from their place. Let the game make its new files. I think they r in C drive, documents
OR
1st try just deleting file "gta_sa.set" in GTA San Andreas User Files, if didn't work then delete (or remove) all the save folders.
I also faced similar issue when switched to win 10 from 7.

[Szymon7022]

Should I restart the computer after doing that ? Because after removing the folder and not restaring just nothing happens, the game still doesn't work.

[Szymon7022]

Ok, I just found out that I have a working instance of GTA San Andreas installed on my PC, although it has the Rainbomizer in it. Perhaps I could use this instance to fix my main one ? It has some mods missing, but they're easy to install and remove.

[matteste]

I hear a lot of stuff doesn't work on 11 due to some registry stuff. it does not support Non-Standard ASCII Characters, so it might be what is causing it.

[summer]

i got the same issue too

[Bunjo]

I had the Steam version of GTA San Andreas running on my Windows 11 PC. But it stopped working for some reason - I suspect some Windows update changed infrastructure files. Or possibly an AMD Adrenaline update. I tried many things to find out what was wrong, but didn't document them.

So I uninstalled the Steam app, then redid a base installation from Steam on 31 March 2024.... into separate location, not Program Files (86).

Overlaid the installation with San Andreas Definitive Edition files.

I have an ultrawide screen so...

Added GTSA.WidescreenFix.zip (to get the latest Vorbis.dll)

Widescreen now proportional and effective.
Recent saves effective.

Still have to tap space to progress the start sequence to the load game menu.

But I have to delete gta_sa.set file every time I start the game again. I'll probably create a bat file to do this and start the game.

I hope that helps, but this is necessarily specific to my PC.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
And then... after I started a new game and made several saves I couldn't start the game later. I repeated the steps above with no success.

This time I changed the settings in 'scripts' GTSA.WidescreeFix.ini to
ForceAspectRatio = auto
FrontendAspectRatio = auto
RestoreCutsceneFOV = 0

Still have to tap space to progress the start sequence to the load game menu.

But I have to delete gta_sa.set file every time I start the game again.

Will it last?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A further update

Switched the in-game frame limiter to 'off'
FramerateVigilante default 30
Switched monitor refresh (from 120) to 60.

Game launches with no hesitations and without needing to delete gta_sa.set.

I wonder if the start sequence problems were due to hardware conflicts between monitor and game?