Awhile back (maybe 4 years) I rebought Sonic Adventure for DC off of Ebay, it was brand new (factory shrink wrap) and I nabbed it for $10-12. Thing is, the Dreamcast refused to read it. So I take the disc out and inspect, it looks divine, so I felt puzzled. Stuck it in the PC and it also would not read it. I just couldn't understand. Pretty sure it was a hassle trying to return it because it was sealed and since I opened it they refused, but it is definitely not a bootleg. I am just wondering if there was any official shipments of poorly pressed discs? (or just a few that sneak through?)
Same thing happened to me long ago with a PAL version of Rayman for the Dreamcast. I never found an answer for that curse..
I've heard that some early versions of SA weren't pressed very well. ...I visit too many forums. I honestly can't give you a source for that.
Hmm, could be. It was the original version, as after that I bought the greatest hits one. I dunno though, I still have it, I might as well as give it a go in my new Disc Drive.
Same thing happened to me with Sonic Adventure as well. The seller should still let you return it though, in my opinion.
hi, same thing happened to me ina shaop i worked for i think the game was echo pal version we had a box of 10 or 15 customer returned one complaining that it did not work swapped it over came back complaining again so we opened up a new dreamcast thinking it might be the customer and ended up going through 6 of our copies finding none of them worked. the only other thing that came up was having a warped cd caused by extreme heat like the cd being left in a car or direct sunlight this is easily spotted if you place your cd ina laptop cd drive and it makes a whirling or rubbing sound this will suggest the cd is warped and cannot be read properly i agree return it for a refund
Yup. A large batch of US 'launch' Sonic Adventure and Blue Stinger discs were faulty. It's a confirmed story.
More info here:- http://www.zdnet.co.uk/news/it-strategy/1999/09/10/some-dreamcast-games-not-working-2073597/
Yep. Mine was fine at launch, but my cousins either refused to load, or froze quite often. Happened with a few launch games.
Thanks for the info and links, surprised this was a bigger problem than I thought. I must've just got lucky with my release day SA. I hate to admit, but I miss all the good times had with the Dreamcast in the beginning. Now that I recollect, I see why so many praise the Dream.
Haha, this happened to me when I went to go get my first Dreamcast. It was right after it got discontinued and you could pick up a used DC for a song, and all I wanted to do was buy the console itself with a copy of Sonic Adventure. I ended up standing there for a good 10-15 minutes while the employees were mixing and matching defective Dreamcasts with a stack of defective copies of Sonic Adventure (both original and All-Stars). Eventually, they found a pair that worked and I walked out with an original copy (which had a handful of strange glitches iirc), but I was shocked at how many copies of that game didn't work in a row.
Guess i'll chime in on this topic as well since it's happened to me too yes a lot of sonic adventure copies that were avaliable on launch day wouldn't boot or constantly crashed on retail dreamcasts (about 70% of all launch copies of SA and a few other games were like this if memory serves me right) but the disks that had booting problems but didn't crash weren't nessicarly 100% defective (Mine wasn't). the problem was more of an important detail that SEGA had overlooked until it became an apparent problem. A lot of people believe that the disks wouldn't boot or crashed because of a printing plant was printing defective disks this isn't entirely the case from what I understand while SEGA was still developing early dreamcast games they used a unique bit of security code in the game that made the disk unusable on a retail unit unless you had a special developer boot disk (or if you could get lucky enough to get the game to boot without it). Turns out sega sent the master copy of the game that still had this security code left in to printing plants and thus they were unknowingly printing copies of the game that were unusable for average joe dreamcast users after reports of the booting problems began pouring into sega's offices they quickly issued a recall for all unusable copies and sent pinting plants a second master without the peice of security code that prevented the game from booting and had them do a reprint of the game. From the above info I gather that the printing plants weren't entirely at fault for the bad press like everyone says they are and not suprisingly a pretty big batch of the original prints that require the boot disk still exist and get sold so if your looking for an original sonic adventure (not the all stars version) it's pretty much a gamble with a pretty good possibility that you might not get the non all star reprint.
I can confirm this as I was working for Babbages/Software Ect (GameStop now) and we had to send all of our SA launch disks back and got replacements. The replacements do not look any different then the first batch. Another disc that wouldn't work is the first Dreamcast magazine disc. Some of them would work though (mine didn't work :crying: ). =hugh
I had bought sonic shuffle and had probs booting up would not work its was there disc pressing and a few other games where the same. I had a dreamcast way back in 8/9/1999 few hours before release day as i ordered it on empire stores.
Well we really can't blame sega for issuing the recall since the whole mess was their fault to begin with they made a mistake and they tried to fix the problem (but that still doesn't excuse the fact that copies that require the developer boot disk are still out in the wild for people to risk buying, I've encountered 2 of such copies in my life so I speak from experience). As for the vol 1 disk of the official dreamcast magazine chances are you just got a bad print (every game has at least a few bad prints so I wouldn't worry about that as much as I would with SA) Sounds to me like you get very lucky with getting bad prints of games Lucky :/
Bumping an incredibly old topic: I've had an unusable Sonic Adventure disc for ages at work and for shit and giggles I test it in every damn DC I came across, recently I got a Dreamcast to boot it! I was amazed, I was aware of the whole debacle and heard rumors that some DC might be able to read it. It finally happened! I bundled it with the Dreamcast unit and kissed it goodbye. Explained the whole situation to the customer who's bought it, we had a good laugh.
