When Blockbuster Video Tried Burning Game Cartridges on Demand

&gt;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.<p>I was part of the early CD-ROM days with a Yamaha CD-ROM burner in 1994. It was well over $3000. It wasn&#x27;t until 1995 that HP introduced a writer for under $1000 at $995. Worse, the early burners didn&#x27;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&#x27;s I purchased were in the $30&#x2F;each range.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_Super_NES_enhancement_chips" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;List_of_Super_NES_enhancement_...</a> would have made it difficult to do this on the SNES, especially for great games like Yoshi&#x27;s Island that took advantage of this.

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. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ULRz20droeg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=ULRz20droeg</a>

Didn&#x27;t Sega have the &quot;Sega Channel&quot; for streaming roms to something like this at one point?<p>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

Aside from a some high profile &#x2F; high demand games.... was this really solving a problem? I don&#x27;t recall ever having problems getting my hands on a cartridge.<p>Obviously there are some supply chain savings and such but at least as far as availability I&#x27;m not sure this solved much.

Towards the end of the 90s I did some work for a startup who&#x27;d made an on-demand system for PC&#x2F;Mac software. The unit was huge and contained a 4 burner&#x2F;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.<p>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&#x27;t look like the usual bluey-green home burned ones.

Goes to show that the best ideas don&#x27;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.

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.

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.