Awesome. Hope you can pull this off. Curious to know if someone in Europe will stand up to produce these. I would definitely get one.
Since I can't solder them myself, there's not a lot I can do right now. But if a trusted party is involved, I may consider helping the funding of the shipment.
Yes. I just got confirmation that the chips are available.
I got a big distributor in Japan with a few sealed boxes, 30 USD FOB per unit with minimum of 240 units. They cannot split the shipment and only send via DHL with pre-paid taxes, unfortunately.
Also got another vendor in China selling up to 50 units, 45 USD FOB per unit.
What I'm trying now is to get my traditional supplier in China to buy the 240 units from Japan and send me via another way than DHL. Via DHL, which is the only option from Japan to Brazil, taxes will be automatically charged. And that adds 50% import tax + 60% local state tax, bringing the cost per chip to something around 70USD.
If my supplier agrees to buy the package (of course charging something) I may get those chips to manufacture cartridges. The ideal situation would be sending half of those (~120) to Europe so you guys can get someone building and sending cartridges within the EU.
I'll update you all with new developments...
Hmm... Well, I'm in Europe, what are the costs and such, associated with this? I might be interested in assembling some cartridges btw, if I could get some V9990's and an MSX2+ computer as a reward! ^^ Ahem. I totally need some way to test this darn cartridge, now that I've finished my draft of the design.
I should probably mention that I work for an embedded electronics solution-provider here in northern Europe, and I should be able to use our electronics-lab to assemble some boards after-hours.