Dreamcast-Talk.com

I just bought PSO v1 and plan on getting a DreamPi relatively soon. Did I make a bad decision getting v1?

There are very few players that use v1 on sylverant. You can still play no problem but will be very limited to joining matches. Best just to get a copy of v2

Sure
My friend plays ver.1 on PC - account on Sylverant server.
I play ver.2 on Dreamcast. There are no problems and we play together a lot.

You can but the team you join needs to be a v1 team (a v2 player will have an option to make it v1). I would still recommend getting v2 though or you'll miss out on a lot. There are far fewer quests available on v1, the level cap is lower (100 vs. 200), there's no Ultimate difficulty, and no Challenge and Battle modes. There are other improvements and additions in v2 as well. You can see the full list here.

Yes and no. When a V2 player makes a team, they have the option of allowing V1 players to join or not. But if they do choose to allow V1 players, then they won't be able to do a lot of stuff that isn't in V1. For this reason, roughly 80% of the teams that people make only allow V2 players to join.

My recommendation is just to get V2 instead. However, it's worth mentioning that V1 save files can be transferred to V2, so if you want to play with V1 for a while and then get V2 later, that will work.

Get V2. Find a used copy online, just make sure it has the Serial and Access key.

You can start playing V1 now, it will just be rare for you to ever find people to play with. Most people will be in V2 rooms which you wont even be able to see. Once you get V2 you can convert your character over to a v2 savefile.