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When Blockbuster Video Tried Burning Game Cartridges on Demand
- testplzignore 8y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Super_NES_enhancement_chips https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Super_NES_enhancement_... 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 8y agoEasy, just put FPGAs in them :P
- badlucklottery 8y agoThat's actually the current solution for SNES enhancement chip games: https://sd2snes.de https://sd2snes.de
- spilk 8y agoThey did do this for SNES: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_Power_(cartridge) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_Power_(cartridge) Obviously it was limited to games that did not use enhancement chips as you mention.
- rocky1138 8y agoI 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 8y agoMulti-Game Hunter and files off of your local (or LD) AmiExpress BBS did this for SNES/Genesis. http://videogamedevelopmentdevices.wikia.com/wiki/Multi_Game_Hunter http://videogamedevelopmentdevices.wikia.com/wiki/Multi_Game...
- your-nanny 8y agoGoes 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 8y agoBlockbuster'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.
- jeffalyanak 8y agoEven the Famicom/NES had specialized hardware in many of its cartridges. Particularly you saw a number of sound expansions that existed as additional chips sitting on the cartridge.
- your-nanny 8y agoGood point. I was thinking more of the movie/music side of their plan.
- brirec 8y ago> 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_ 8y agoUntil Krikzz stops producing them. His GBA carts are 10x faster than the ones from AliExpress (and 10x the cost, too)
- supernovae 8y agoDidn'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
- Jeremy1026 8y agoYep. 30 games that rotated monthly all over your cable subscription (additional fee applied).
- huehehue 8y agoOh man, that reminds me of Satellaview. In the mid-to-late 90s, they would broadcast games to Super Famicom consoles. I'm pretty sure they could deliver real-time audio streams (voice acting) via SoundLink as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellaview https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellaview
- freehunter 8y agoI'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 8y agoSony 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-adds-downloading-of-ps4-ps2-games/ https://blog.us.playstation.com/2018/09/20/playstation-now-a...
- supernovae 8y agoyeah i love xbox game pass. That + EA means i have more games than ever... i have 300 games installed just from free monthly games for gold, ea and xbox pass.
- patcheudor 8y ago>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.
- k__ 8y agoBurning was a adventure back in the days xD
- MisterTea 8y agoIt sure was. I forget what brand my first CD Burner was (wanna say HP) but it was very susceptible to skips from shaking which would ruin the burn (around 98 or so). It was an old house with old floors and old furniture. So the CD burning procedure was to start the burn, gently tip toe out of the office, and close the door. Perhaps it was excessive but ruining a $10-20 cd wasn't exactly a fun thought for a kid on a budget.
- wumms 8y agoIn 1997 I upgraded my Yamaha SCSI CDR from 2x to 4x just by soldering out a 0R SMD resistor.
- ct520 8y agoYeah I remember keeping everyone away from pc to avoid mouse being moved causing a buffer underrun.. windows 311 :-/
- whalesalad 8y agoThis reminds me that I thought I could mount a CD burner from one computer in the house as a “network drive” so that I could burn CDs from a different computer. Good times.
- duxup 8y agoAside 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 8y agoWhen 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.
- duxup 8y agoI remember like SMB3 early on was hard to get, also rent, but aside from a handful of situations that always seemed to end pretty fast.
- swozey 8y agoWe were hiding the games you wanted behind games you didn't until we got enough allowance.
- w0m 8y ago100% this, i'd hide games in the vhs section
- lev99 8y agoHigh profile / high demand games actually were a bigger problem than your stating. However this solves other problems. Reduced floor space usage. Better breath of inventory. Better customer service, you'll always have every title in stock.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- spilk 8y agoNintendo 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.
- ct520 8y agoNothing 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.
- crtasm 8y agoTowards 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.