I am an owner of 2 msx computers.An msx2 8235 and a nsm8280 msx2 from philips.Both were with diskdrives but had many cartridge games.I think that cartridges were very common for my machine and that disk cracks appeared.
I am under the impression that machines with diskdrives do not need cartridges.Msx was the exception because it was not only a game machine but ran dos,cpm and the philips nms8280 models were used in tv stations because of the genlocking stuff present.
What i mean is that cracked games from disk load too fast and that most disk games too.Back in the day in the amiga it would make no sense to have a rom solution.In the start games were only 1 or 2 disks,3 disks came later but i think by that time any thought to have other mediums must have surely been something not an option.
However don't forget the action replay cartridge,in theory this is what we are talking about.Someone could design a game that would run under cartridge like the action replay does.
