Depends on which version of Vice City you played. The original PS2 version would not have had access to a hard drive.
GTA: San Andreas on the XBOX did allow you to use such a feature, provided that you had used the XBOX's disc drive to rip the audio CDs yourself. I recall letting the XBOX rip all of my System of a Down CDs circa 2005 for expressly this purpose.
> They later extended it on the Xbox 360 to allow you to link in your Windows Vista machine to stream your MP3's straight to it
The Xbox 360 expanded on the feature in some neat ways -- if you had an iPod or other portable player, you could plug that in via USB, it supported generic DLNA shares (so you could play music from Kodi/XBMC running on a PC), and some (most?) games would flag cutscene audio vs. in-game audio, which would allow the system to pause the user-provided audio and fall back to the game's soundtrack for cutscenes.
What's crazy is those 360 profile settings still apply to 360 games on modern Xboxes. I was really surprised to see it remembered something I set on my old 360 like 10 years back.
Oh yeah I distinctly remember playing Deftones over and over and over from local files on the PC version, to the point that all I can think about when I see GTA or hear Minerva is the other one.
After loading, the entire game (from opening screen to ending scene) fit completely into the PSX's tiny RAM.
And the in-game background music was just regular CD audio tracks on the game disk, which was easy since the drive wasn't used for anything else anyway.
Open the drive, swap disks for your choice of audio CD, and it was happy to play those tracks instead.
(Or, alternatively: Put the Ridge Racer game disk into a regular CD player and enjoy the synthwave soundtrack all on its own.)
I remember this on GTA III, played on Windows XP. I think the radio station was called "MP3 Player", and there was an empty folder in the game's application folder to which you could add MP3s.
I have a feeling the original '97 GTA could kinda do that. Or maybe GTA2.
You could find the directories on disk where the radio music was stored and just copy in your own stuff.
I recall TrackMania Sunrise was like this. That game was made to be modded, so it kinda made sense they made replacing audio easy.
Side note: After watching The Stig's laps while listening to dull audio on Top Gear, I tried replacing TrackMania's music with very soothing music. My times got better.
I vaguely recall that '97 GTA allowed you to eject the disc after the game started and load an audio CD that would play when you selected the custom radio station.
Excite Truck on the Wii also had that feature. You could load mp3s onto the SD card. It was a launch title, so I was expecting most Wii games to support that feature, but I think only a couple ended up with it.
GTA 3 certainly did. I remember because I basically spent a few weeks listening to Weezer's Green album (that came out a few months prior) over and over while playing the game.
