MondoGecko wrote:Here's a video comparing Crazy Taxi 1 on GDemu and GD-ROM, both captures are confirming the issues I've been seeing. Note the Crazy Dash in both captures when the game first starts. On closer inspection this seems like it could be more of an issue with really poor frame pacing as opposed to frame rate but either way I would describe this as chugging. You can see it happen again at a few points, but notably when the taxi is going through the grass at around the 1:20 mark. Everything just seems to slow down for a bit, like the actual speed of the game slows down.
And here's a video (like countless others online) where this doesn't happen.
https://youtu.be/gUieDc2ch98
With a similar route from the start of the video to that patch of grass at around 1:15 (and beyond) there's no such stutter or slowdown. Maybe a badly burnt disc without the duplicated data meant to aid with loading or a failing drive after all these years is the reason for it above. Or it's a fluke where the drive just didn't keep up at some random point that wouldn't be replicated even on that set up. Even if there's some slowdown in this video that I missed while skimming it, it's hardly frequent, notable or even repeatable vs GTAIII's issues:
https://youtu.be/rXWRN6aicfQ
To me it's clear with an engine like Crazy Taxi's (and 2's) and its often very dense traffic or parked cars or pedestrians where relevant they had room to do things like reduce the target frame rate to half, half the traffic density and even the overall game speed to increase individual asset detail or the pop in or add other game elements. The cities are also more diverse than given credit for (though the default city is quite small and almost a circuit in design there's always the others in both games to show it could do more), it's cool seeing less visited locations that are quite different to the central stuff most see in 5 minutes of play. Idk if they could do a GTA back then (what developer could do it with good gameplay, I don't even like GTAIII's on foot stuff) but there could have been some sleek, more grounded and less arcadey game a la Driver 1 or 2 (I never liked the sequels) with ease. And of course if Dreamcast had lasted longer there could definitely be some real sandbox games. Even DS got some and it was not as powerful, closer to N64 quality except with good framerates.
https://youtu.be/MJdmjUxcE1c
Here's a Dreamcast using an SD card and serial port adapter with Dreamshell, it stutters and hangs all over the place. These games constantly stream data off the disc, similar to GTAIII on PS2. Any external problems with the read speed lead to abnormalities like yours.
https://youtu.be/UN1QtQqYLPc
