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That’s a bummer. I’ll try and increase the laser intensity for now, and find another laser to replace it with for when this one eventually kicks the bucket.

Thanks for your help

Is this by chance a PAL copy of Crazy Taxi?

Had the same issue, long story short, *some* of the PAL ones are bad batches that suffer from bit rot.

Get a NTSC-J copy, play, be happy

mstar wrote:Is this by chance a PAL copy of Crazy Taxi?

Had the same issue, long story short, the PAL ones are bad batches that suffer from bit rot.

Get a NTSC-J copy, play, be happy

Is that right? I've had two PAL copies go wonky on me in the same way now - again the only disc in my collection to have done so and it's happened twice! NTSC-J copy it is.

Quick question, why NTSC-J and not NTSC-U copy?

dave_van_damn wrote:It's definitely a disc drive problem, I'm afraid. The game reads the levels on the fly and is constantly loading. The laser is too weak to keep up.

Just to clarify - I'm basing this assessment from trying to play the game from a burned CD-R years ago. The disc was poorly burnt and my DC struggled to read it. As a result, the road would disappear a lot. A few years later I had Crazy Taxi 2 on SD-ISO using the serial port SD adapter and same thing happened. So I'm assuming it's a data read problem and therefore a GD laser problem.

The PAL disc thing is interesting though. I never knew there were bad runs of the PAL version. I own it and occasionally got a "read error" message on the screen.

Crazy Taxi is on mine black list, about decreasing gd-rom life lol
this ... and all the other games that make the laser mechanism do a continuously loud ZIIIG ZAAG sound

Roareye wrote:

mstar wrote:Is this by chance a PAL copy of Crazy Taxi?

Had the same issue, long story short, the PAL ones are bad batches that suffer from bit rot.

Get a NTSC-J copy, play, be happy

Is that right? I've had two PAL copies go wonky on me in the same way now - again the only disc in my collection to have done so and it's happened twice! NTSC-J copy it is.

Quick question, why NTSC-J and not NTSC-U copy?

Just personal observation, i've a PAL and a NTSC-J copy - the NTSC-J one works without a hitch, can't say if a NTSC-U copy would be ok too...

Also personal observation, quite a few PAL GD-ROMs are reported to be basically badly pressed, another offender i've in the back of my mind is REZ PAL and Sonic Adventure 1 PAL...

Other than that, all of them are optical media which will go bad, sooner or later - that is matter of fact

I dont know about any bad PAL crazy taxi gdroms mine was never bad only one that i know of bad i had 2 brandnew PAL blue stinger copys real gdroms both would crash not boot this is on a brand new dreamcast at the time.. But not crazy taxi brand new at the time PAL version i say it's disk rot or how it was stored..

Main offender on PAL was blue stinger and shadow man both brand new had problems

l0l @ solved

mstar wrote:Is this by chance a PAL copy of Crazy Taxi?

Had the same issue, long story short, the PAL ones are bad batches that suffer from bit rot.

Get a NTSC-J copy, play, be happy

Well, I've played a PAL copy on another Dreamcast someone I know has, and it played fine. Though I sometimes seen some level delay loading a little, but not enough for it to be an issue.

Yeah not seen many PAL gdroms play up but the 2 i talked about PAL dreamcasts some had the better gdrom drive