Phantasy Star Online not working on Dreamcast (NTSC-U)

The disc is in mint condition but when I try to play it it reaches the white licensing screen and then bounces to the bios menu. In the cd player mode it shows the PSO disc art (albeit the Japanese art but that i think is normal). About 1 out of 10 times it will boot properly. I have tried all 3 of my Dreamcasts (which all work) and the result is the same.

Was there a bad batch of PSO V1? Or can someone else explain this.

 

Wow, that really does sound like a bad disk. I'm a PSO expert and have never seen that. I'd try a pirate version and see whether that works - this might distinguish between a bad legit disk and some other problem.

Are you using an American Dreamcast or a modded foreign one?

 

Sounds like a dying gd-rom board/lens to me. Does it do the same with other games?

 

I had a copy of Elemental Gimmick gear which acted a bit like this, I eventually concluded that disc rot was the culprit

 

I tried it on 3 units:
1 NTSC-U Kiosk unit (V0)
1 NTSC-U Prerelease rental unit (V1)
1 NTSC-U V0
I had an NTSC-U V1 a few months back and it did the same.

On 4 units? The Kiosk unit maybe, it seems to be struggling more than the others. Also they all work with my other games, including PSO V2 (I prefer V1).

Which is odd, my prerelease v1 system is able to boot the game about 80% of the time IF given about 20 minutes to warm up first. Disc rot is a progressive condition too (I know from experience with LaserDiscs and DVDs), once it boots it runs reliably so I doubt it is laser rot, I have also had this copy of the game for years and it has ALWAYS done this. At the time I thought there might be some kind of lockout caused by using Version 2.

 

PSO v1 and v2 both write to the system flash to store your product key. You could try wiping the flash witha flash reset disk. Dunno what else you'd lose, though.

I still think a bad disk is the most likely scenario.

 

Been there, done that.

 

expert? more like you shouldve worked for sonic team!