The Blockbuster Game Factory cartridge system

I always found this cart interesting. It basically was what nintendo power(japanese snes kiosk flasher) was but for the U.S. audience. I didn't realize the games were flashed from a dial up server.

Always thought it was a machine that already had some games on it allowing it to flash instantly. Anyone know if you can program to it?

 

Seems to be a nice multilayer PCB makes trying to find where pads go fun..

 

From what I've read there is a blue and a green label version of this cartridge. Does anybody know if there is a difference between the two?

 

That.

 

It's funny they put the 7474 and 74139 in a GAL, gotta wonder what else is in there since nothing else is needed.

 

Those are pretty sweet. Looks they're fairly difficult to come by...

 

Do any of these ever have games still on them? I have a green one of these but there's nothing it.

 

Could you open and scan it ?
Would be cool to know what color is used for what function.

 

I doubt that they were flashed while a dial up connection was getting data for it. I would think that dial up was used to transmit each game to the rental stores, and it would still take several minutes to flash a game to the cartridge. If you actually tried to flash the cartridge as the dial up link was going that would take ridiculusly long even on a 56K as I remember. I think it took like a half hour to download 4 megabytes.

It'd be really cool if someone had one of the systems they used to program these cartridges or just a detailed account of someone who worked there and worked with it.

 

I don't have a scanner but here's some photos. Please excuse the obnoxious watermark but I didn't want someone using the pics to scam someone.

 

Probably limiting the carts via software by inserting 16Mbit of random undeletable junk on it (I remember Motorola doing something similar with its lower-end phones some years ago) is cheaper and easier to do than a batch of carts for every size, specially when so few of these were produced.

 

h: I used to have one!!!!! The blockbuster near my old house got shut down and I was left with a Cart containing Altered Beast. I sold it at a garage sale 10 years ago not knowing how much it was worth!!!

OH:OH:OH:OH:OH:OH:OH:

 

And here I thought I'd seen it all when it comes to Sega goodies.

I've never seen one of these before, let alone heard of one.

It is possible to rewrite the cart with any standard programmer?

I don't see any custom interface on there, so I'm assuming it is flashed via the cart interface.

-hl718

 

In 1994 wouldn't it be more like 14.4K or 28.8K? I had a 14.4K and I remember spending HOURS downloading a 6MiB Earthworm Jim demo.

I wonder what they did with the save games after the customer returned the cart. They could have A) erased them B) saved them for all customers renting _____ game or C) made a save file for each game / customer.

There's nothing in there that does that, small games are addressed using "partial decoding". This means that the significant address lines are ignored by the chip since they aren't connected and the data repeats ("mirrors"/"shadows") over the selected address space, which on MD is a 32M area. Since the Flash is 16M or 32M, any smaller game data is doubled up to simulate partial decoding if the game requires it for protection. In the case of non-2^n sized games, the smaller ROM is either further partially decoded (doubled up to 2^n) or fully decoded which means that the space between the second ROM and 2^n is "open bus" which is a pattern of unusable data left over from bus capacitance.

The GAL could act as a configuration register to limit the size of the Flash/SRAM, but that wouldn't be very feasible since the state could easily get corrupted and GALs (PLD in general) are power hogs and definitely aren't suited to battery backup, it'd drain the CR2032 in a day. The only thing ROM/RAM limiting would do is save a minute or two Flashing the game and leave in any copy protection, but they'd instead probably hack it out of the game.

It appears so but maybe one GAL is used to gate/unlock /WR for the flash.

 

I think I have a game informer that mentions this cart somewhere but didn't go into detail about what it actually was, so I've always been curious.

Thanks for sharing!


Also, were games really downloaded with a dial up connection? Didn't the Sega Channel get released around that time and used a pretty fast cable connection?

 

I picked up a green one tho other day. Mine still has a game on it espn speed world. I have to buy a gamebit to open tho anyone know what kind of value this has

 

This couldn't have been a nation wide thing... could it? I spent time in Kansas and Minnesota at that time and never saw anything like this, despite being a frequenter of Blockbuster.