
When Blockbuster Video Tried Burning Game Cartridges on Demand - szczys
https://hackaday.com/2018/10/01/remember-when-blockbuster-video-tried-burning-game-cartridges-on-demand/
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patcheudor
>Even if someone were able to obtain an unauthorized copy, a decent CD-ROM
drive, sans burning capabilities, still cost in the neighborhood of $600.

I was part of the early CD-ROM days with a Yamaha CD-ROM burner in 1994. It
was well over $3000. It wasn't until 1995 that HP introduced a writer for
under $1000 at $995. Worse, the early burners didn't have any cache, so to
support the Yamaha, I was using a high-end dual-processor Pentium system that
was in the neighborhood of $16,000 and I still got plenty of buffer under-
runs! On top of all this, the first writeable CD's I purchased were in the
$30/each range.

~~~
achairapart
Also: those cd burners were 1x so it was a whole painful endless hour to burn
a single CD-ROM!

~~~
therein
An epiphany I once had as I was waiting for that endless hour to come to an
end was Nero has a logo of the Colosseum on fire. It is a circular structure,
like a burning CD and it is on fire because "Nero set Rome on fire".

~~~
tgsovlerkhgsel
Also, the full name was "Nero Burning ROM". It came from a German company, and
Rome is spelled Rom in German.

~~~
zokier
And if we are reminiscing Nero, these track (and others like it) might bring
up some memories:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDWAmgwQvOk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDWAmgwQvOk)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yovnD-
yI68U](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yovnD-yI68U)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0u39ZqQYOHM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0u39ZqQYOHM)

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testplzignore
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Super_NES_enhancement_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Super_NES_enhancement_chips)
would have made it difficult to do this on the SNES, especially for great
games like Yoshi's Island that took advantage of this.

~~~
tzakrajs
Easy, just put FPGAs in them :P

~~~
badlucklottery
That's actually the current solution for SNES enhancement chip games:
[https://sd2snes.de](https://sd2snes.de)

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rocky1138
I believe Nintendo did this first in the 1980s with their Famicom disk drive.
Players were able to buy games at a kiosk which copied the games to a floppy.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULRz20droeg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULRz20droeg)

~~~
1001101
Multi-Game Hunter and files off of your local (or LD) AmiExpress BBS did this
for SNES/Genesis.

[http://videogamedevelopmentdevices.wikia.com/wiki/Multi_Game...](http://videogamedevelopmentdevices.wikia.com/wiki/Multi_Game_Hunter)

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supernovae
Didn't Sega have the "Sega Channel" for streaming roms to something like this
at one point?

I do remember being impressed with virtua fighter and virtua racing having
processors embedded in the cart - that was a creative way to give life to the
Genesis - obviously not being able to be be burned at the store unless there
was a custom cart

~~~
freehunter
I've missed the Sega Channel for so long. I recently bought an Xbox One and
was pretty pleased to find a "Sega Channel"-like subscription service. I'm a
lot happier paying $8/mo for a big library of games than paying $60 for one
game that I might only play for a month or two anyway.

~~~
joshschreuder
Sony recently announced they are turning their Playstation Now service into a
similar thing (previously it was cloud streamed titles, now you can download
the title to your console for a monthly fee)

[https://blog.us.playstation.com/2018/09/20/playstation-
now-a...](https://blog.us.playstation.com/2018/09/20/playstation-now-adds-
downloading-of-ps4-ps2-games/)

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duxup
Aside from a some high profile / high demand games.... was this really solving
a problem? I don't recall ever having problems getting my hands on a
cartridge.

Obviously there are some supply chain savings and such but at least as far as
availability I'm not sure this solved much.

~~~
w0m
When i was like 10, every time my parents were grocery shopping i'd walk into
the (attached) video rental store and ask for specific copies of a couple
games that were hard to get. To date myself, this was likely NES era.

~~~
swozey
We were hiding the games you wanted behind games you didn't until we got
enough allowance.

~~~
w0m
100% this, i'd hide games in the vhs section

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crtasm
Towards the end of the 90s I did some work for a startup who'd made an on-
demand system for PC/Mac software. The unit was huge and contained a 4
burner/1 printer+robotic arm device, a raid array, two printers (black and
white for manual, colour -from solid wax cartridges! - for DVD case insert),
an iMac for customer to browse and make selection and a POS touchscreen.

All software was being sold in the big box style at the time so we did a lot
of rejigging artwork for DVD case. We had blank CDs with a gold underside so
they didn't look like the usual bluey-green home burned ones.

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your-nanny
Goes to show that the best ideas don't always win, especially when they
collide with the interests of critical partners. Maybe it took Napster et al.
to really break open the status quo.

~~~
babypuncher
Blockbuster's plan failed because too many games were shipping on cartridges
with custom hardware on the PCB.

In the NES days it was simple data mapper chips that allowed a program to
address more than 40kb of ROM by switching between multiple 40kb data banks.
On the SNES this went much further, with games including specialized co-
processors for things like sprite scaling, digital signal processing, and even
hardware accelerated 3D scene rendering.

Making a universal cartridge that can handle all of this is a challenge even
today.

~~~
brirec
> Making a universal cartridge that can handle all of this is a challenge even
> today.

Oh it is, but let me tell you: it's beautiful.
[http://krikzz.com/forum/index.php?topic=8045.0](http://krikzz.com/forum/index.php?topic=8045.0)

~~~
voltagex_
Until Krikzz stops producing them. His GBA carts are 10x faster than the ones
from AliExpress (and 10x the cost, too)

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ct520
Nothing like the good ol days. Burning a cd at 1x with your Yamaha in windows
311. Move the mouse and BOOM buffer under run. Kids today will never know the
struggle.

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spilk
Nintendo did this extensively in Japan, first with the Disk Writer for the
Famicom Disk System and then later with Nintendo Power kiosks for Super
Famicom and Gameboy.

