greghope667 / master-rallye-freeze-patcher Goto Github PK

Do note this is just a wild guess based off the description of your fix, and it's not based off any research whatsoever - I don't even have the game installed at the moment, so I've not disassembled the executable either. I'm more leaving this here for future reference.

If the game freezes and takes way too long to process when rendering is disabled, it's plausible that the issue just comes from some code executing too quickly, and either hitting a broken code path or exposing broken assumptions - for example, if a frame takes less than 1ms to process, and somewhere in the game's code this frame delta time is stored as an integer, it'll come to be 0 and thus time "stops".

I encountered a near identical issue in TOCA 2, where the delay loop ran so quickly it hit a broken code path, and started counting time "backwards". I have a pseudocode snippet available here:
https://cookieplmonster.github.io/2021/05/09/silentpatch-toca-2-touring-cars/#fixing-the-way-time-flows

Much like your approach, the old community fix required changing a single byte in the code, this time to skip the delay loop entirely - I instead identified the issue and rewrote the delay loop to be free of such issues.