True Crime: Streets of LA is a generally well-liked open-world game of the post-GTA 3 era. Eventually, the series developed into the excellent 2012 game Sleeping Dogs. But in between those two points lies True Crime: New York City, an overambitious mess of a game with a legendary selection of bugs and glitches. Now, at least, it’s given GameCube emulator devs a way to make Dolphin better.
“Over the course of seven years, developers spent hundreds of hours debugging” a particular crash in True Crime: New York City, as the Dolphin devs explain. Any time you would touch a physics object, the game would crash. The original version on GameCube had bugs, sure, but the game didn’t just crash like that.
The developers eventually learned that TC:NYC was dividing by zero every time one of those physics collisions would happen. You can get a more technical breakdown in the devs’ own words – I’m out of my depth on abstract math – but typically, you don’t want computers dividing by zero. Initially, the devs thought this was a bug with Dolphin itself. In the end, they discovered that this was actually how the game was meant to work.