my buffy the vampire slayer was always crashing exactly at the point where it was supposed to load my saved game. it would start loading (or summoning as it's called in buffy) and then give me the dirty disk message 100% of the time. i was getting really pissed, and i thought someone had sold me a disk with a bad image on it. then i figured out that if i just let the game just completely do it's thing on startup, in other words, not skip any of the intros, let it show the complete startup demo, etc. and then wait a few additional seconds (just to be safe) before going to the load game screen, it works flawlessly every time. i'm not sure if this might help with other games or not, but i figured i would spread the word. fyi, my chip is a homebrew w/ evoltion x on it.