The current plan is to produce some ~50 PCBs, assemble ~20-25 with our stock of donors and needed parts, and the rest (~25-30) will be available as loose cards for your soldering pleasure. So we don't need any donor cards at the moment, nor are we planning to offer any discount, etc, if these are offered. So, if you are fine with soldering, you'd better keep it and get the loose PCB later, thus you'll be able to build the card yourself and save some bucks 😀
The PCB design will not be released (at least in the next few years), other production batches will depend on the demand and overall success of the project.
The PCB is a 6-layer one, so doing a reverse engineering should be quite complicated (at least I hope so), and we'll try to put more Easter eggs inside in order to prevent pirates from making copycat boards.
As far as the price is concerned, the only thing I can mention at this moment is that we're struggling to keep the price tag for the loose PCB under $100.
Expect the first review soon (in Russian, but we hope to make English subtitles). The official VOGONS beta test is being delayed due to Covid - the package with the prototype card left Russia on May 05, and hasn't reached the Australian shore yet. Let's keep our fingers crossed and hope they haven't lost the parcel on the way.
The final design is still pending some minor bug fixes, and we're still thinking if we should expose the OPL3 at the SB base port(s).
Other than that, we need somebody to tweak the PnP EEPROM firmware a bit - just edit the device description so that it matches the project name. Moreover, it would be great if that could be done from within the known CT4520 flashing tool, thus there won't be any need for an EEPROM programming device to flash it. There is a bit more than just pure esthetics in this need - some distinctive name will enable the UNISOUND tool to distinguish the card from a regular CT4520, thus we'll be able to implement some custom routines (CQM and mixer-related, actually). So if anyone wants to collaborate on that, feel free to PM me.