Just for public information: My DC manufactured November 2000......

[Pylos the Second]

has NO problems playing backups. I had problems at first making backups and thought it might be because of the manufacturing date. However, it was "operator error" or otherwise my own mistakes causing bad burns. I was having problems with some of the backups that have the short audio track in the 1st session. Disc Juggler would burn these without any error. However, on the bottom of the disc you could see a little ring that didn't get burned. I found a utility called CUTTRACK that lets you cut the audio track by 2 sectors or blocks or whatever, and then I burn with cdrecord with no problems. I have NOT had to modify discs to the so called DATA-data format.

Some more numbers off of the bottom of my DC:
Dreamcast HKT-3020
Manufactured: November, 2000 WK
A "2" Circled followed by NTSC-U
Made in China 670-14081N