The Blockbuster Game Factory cartridge system

another thing is it seams to me that the game is a little thicker it seams to be hard to pull out of the sega or put in.

 

Dial-up for me on a 28.8 for AOL (yack) was 2kb/s. 1mb took 10 minutes to download and I could nail 120mb overnight when the line quality went up to a massive 2.4kb/s. Friend down the street got 4kb/s, wanted to murder him.

A single ISDN or even dual ISDN would've made this possible with N64 carts. Could easily couple them together and get some good speed as well as the best damn sounding land line ever.

What I can't believe is that I never saw one of these nor ever heard about them. I still have a few games with the yellow boxes Blockbuster used to rent games out in too. Godawful they were.

EDIT:
Blue cart on eBay for $100 if anyone wants one:
http://cgi.ebay.com/Game-Factory-Blue-Blockbuster-Video-Game-Cartridge-/330363728372

 

has there be a way to reprogram these yet?
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Is there any pictures around of the system used to download the games into the cart? Is it something like the SNES download kiosk?

 

I sold a green one 2 or 3 years ago for around 50$. There is no way of reprogramming them as of now and not alot of reason to do so either since you can get an everdrive or tototek cart for that purpose for almost the same price as what the guy is trying to get for his blue cart (plus label seem beat up). He already relisted it at least once because nobody was buying.

 

Has a firm price point been established for these? I've seen $20, $50 in the previous post, and $100 in the aforementioned Ebay auction...and of course ASSEMbler's $5 cart.

As you probably can guess from this post, I picked one up recently. Green cart, doesn't boot to anything, so I'll probably trade it to someone who's more collect-y than I am.

Also, has the elusive red cart ever actually been found and documented?

 

/gravedigging

There is also red label version. I have not personally seen it but it seems to have been used in magazine reviews and likely has only 8Mbit flash ROM for early games. I have a few blue and green label versions. When I first found it, I didn't know anything about it and thought it was something like a DIY type game maker but it didn't "work". It was only $2.99 at the time, or one cheap McBurger meal. I ended up picking a few more trying to find one that worked. At the time I had only AOL (yak) and no internet so I couldn't do a research.

One of the blue label (which I would let go after I am dead and 6 feet under) has a Toe Jam game. It looks to be the same as retail version.

2 years later I finally find out what the Game Factory is all about. It's also when I found out about the red label version from someone on USENET. This person used to work for a magazine and had a few for game reviews. I can't find the picture and searching USENET seems a bit retarded for some reason so I can't find that info anymore.

I sold and traded a few, one of the trade that netted me a very rare Smurf 2 for SMS (which I later sold for outrageous amount) and I still have 2 blue and 1 green left. The last blanks I have are on eBay presently.

 

so do we know what the pinout on the carts do? I have a green one I would love to make useful.

 

Since this was bumped, I am curious if any user here saw these in any Blockbuster back then? I frequented 3 different stores in Southern California when this service existed, yet have never seen or heard about it until I first joined these forums.

Interested to here about any store location that did this.

 

I've only seen them when I lived in Florida and once when I passed through Georgia on a road trip to my home town. There really wasn't much up advertising them, all I recall was a plain hand-written sign and xeroxed info sheets stacked on a table in the back. With so little attempt to inform potential customers about it, the thing might as well not have existed. But I do enjoy obscure things, so I probably shouldn't say that last part.

 

Hmm would've expected to seem them pushing it, but I was indeed young at the time so for all I know it was at one I had been to. What was this for, anyway? If they ran out of actual cartridges to rent?

 

I saw one at a retro game convention a few weeks ago, I think The Lion King was on it. Gamester81 asking the owner about it lol.