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A few years ago, I had bought a Sega Dreamcast. I love the thing to death, lots of games I would love to get on it. The sonic Adventure series, Jet Grind Radio, Crazy Taxi, Space Channel Five, Chu Chu Rocket, all the good classics I never experienced when I was younger.
Well, I bought the system, a controller, a VMU save card and a couple games all as a bundle, for a not too bad price of $100. The games were some WWE wrestling game, a demo disc with some assorted demos on it, and something I can't remember because I had to throw it out due to disc rot. Not a bad start, bummer about the one game though.
I then got it and noticed a few big issues. First of all, the console was disgusting. Oh well, old used electronics on eBay, I can just give it a good cleaning and it'll be fine. However, one of the games had disc rot, making it entirely unplayable.
Whatever, I have a now cleaned console and a few games. Just gotta buy some other games, right?
After making the purchase for the console, I went around looking through eBay to find some new games, but literally every game I wanted to get was upwards of hundreds of dollars, with insane shipping fees to boot. I looked for months trying to get a good deal, but a good deal never showed up.
I had to resort to burning discs to get any other game at all, and holy hell burning discs for this thing is the most unreliable process.
I first tried to use my laptop, which had a blu-ray drive, to burn the discs. Several discs burned, not worked. I then switched to my desktop PC with a regular old DVD RW drive, and that had about a %50 success rate. Whatever, at least I had more than one working full game and a handful of demos.
I've been thinking of just getting one of those disc drive replacement mods so I can use SD cards instead, because burning discs on this thing is just a nightmare.
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Meliora
Have you tried to look at what some online game stores have to offer? When it comes to older Sega games the price can become quite ridiculous yeah.. Here games for the Dreamcast can be around 30 or 80+ bucks depending on where you look. Flea markets and Yardsales can have some hidden gems sometimes. And if you already did that...maybe look if importing may be cheaper? I have no experience with that though.
JillTheSomething
Not surprised that disk burning is a pain since the Dreamcast uses some weird-ass format.
Yeah, it's a strange process all around. Not even I understand it completely.
First of all, you can't even burn discs for every model of dreamcast. You need a specific model that supports something call "Mil-CD", a format used for karaoke of all things.
And you need to use CDs to burn things to. Annoyingly, CDs, even in their higher capacity formats, do not reach the capacity of the "Gigabyte disc" format, which is, as it's name implies, one Gigabyte.
While not every game used the entire disc space, easily allowing them to be burned to a large CD, others had to be cut down in some way. Maybe some cutscenes were compressed, unused parts of the game removed, to outright removing content, like music or cutscenes, to squeeze everything onto a single disc. It's no wonder it's a nightmare.
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