as i see, very limited quantity expected, thus manual assembly assumed. how much time consume 1 card to be assembled? quite a lot. plus charge for time spend for development and other things, plus some extra for exclusive, plus some profit

I see ... you followed the thread closely.
There's actually a price and a value ... while I can see a financial value being potentially higher than the targeted price, I'm aiming to keep with what I said - and actually build some light scalper protection into the board 😀

no, i'm not following thread. i'm just beholding newly developed devices for old hardware, especially consoles. there is price starts from $100 for quite basic things

btw, are you using 2 layer or more complicated design?

Those usually have a different approach generally being open to everyone or in one case causing a seemingly higher 'demand' than what's the case while having large backstock (rather than opt-in). I'm familiar with the devs of various other devices and can totally respect their pricefinding (ranges from fellow enthusiasts doing small DIY runs to commercially produced devices with a run of 7000 and multiple distributors [i.e. stoneagegamer] so far).

ARGUS is a 2 layer board - no need for 4 layers due to a moderate complexity.

inner layers in soundcards are powerplanes, they using for shielding and also acting as a capacitors . afaik from mid 90's only entry level cards used 2 layer design. i have awe64 gold, gus pnp, tropez plus and all of them are using large powerplanes inside pcb. awe64 value has 2 layers. i'd use 2 inner layers. one for dgnd/agnd and other for vccs

Shielding capacitors 😀

Somewhere around page 10 I've had that discussion already - feel free to read up on why I've decided to make this a 2 layer design (hint: cheaper, no benefits [I have a GUS PnP Rev. 3 which sounds _a lot_ worse than the ARGUS], moderate complexity).

Oooohhh, the first hint about the sound quality really sounds great. The main reason I was so into this was the thin hope that I could finally get a GUS that didn't sound like a cat digging in a litter box (my GUS PnP Pro ver 1.0), or one that sounds as bad and takes a few hours to setup because of its proprietary design (my Compaq/STB GUS PnP Pro). That's why I was willing to donate one to you near the start of the project (to tear the little FU*KER down 🤣), but you had already had one. That's also why I wouldn't mind ripping out the rom's from them, to copy or or directly install them to the ARGUS to save a few bucks.

I see you are planning "light scalper protection", 🤣. I hope that wouldn't prevent sales that stay within the community. Personally I'll be going in the opposite direction and never selling/trading mine. They will be going in the ground with me when its my time to leave this earth. Mine, all mine, ha ha ha!

On a side note, I'd like to verify the bracket of choice. Is it going to be the Audition 32 bracket, or another?

It's perfectly fine to part ways with the card if one wants to, without any financial loss for the seller and a reasonable amount extra for whatever reason ... I just don't want to see the cards for sale on eBay/amibay 3 weeks (or 6 months *hint to 'CommanderMovie'*) after I delivered them for 800% of what I charged.

One thing to shunt the scalpers is to keep the production alive 😉

Quite often these amateur hardware projects are one-off, and if you're late to the party then you have no other choice but to bend over for scalpers. I had it happened to me for limited physical runs of amateur games on ancient machines and I'm just kicking myself on "why wasn't I following the scene one year ago?" Sometimes you just leave for six months, because something else grabbed your attention, and, well, "nothing much happen usually anyway". And then bam, that one project you followed when it started and you kind of forgot about it because it was years ago, got released and sold out in a couple of months.

It's just a general rant not directed towards you, I guess I just got burned one too many times.

Fantastic project shock__!

I spent yesterday evening reading through this thread, and I've learned a lot as a result. It's very impressive the amount of work you've put into this, and is part of the reason why I registered an account here. So kudos to you!

It would indeed be a shame, to see one of these cards go for sale on eBay for 600% of the original price.
As much as I like GUS cards, I have no use for one. I just wanted to say that I hope this will be for the community only.

anthony's calculation is not realistic. for 150$ people just buy used GUS cards 😉

I'd like to donate to,to be able to be in one of the batches, I'd like 3 cards too (yep,every retro PC must have them,and i have some fancy PCs 😉 )

Just look for the SSI-2001 replica wo was found on Ebay for very high price tag...

I also do some projects from which i have no benefit except for supporting the community.
And all files are freely avaible so everyone can build them.

But i don't want to see them selled at all and some shopkeeper gaining all the money for the work i invested..

phreeze (and everyone about to ask) - donations are no longer accepted (which were accepted to fund the project). Wait for the second batch which will be priced a bit higher than the current one which will be just material costs.

Not exactly an update, but still something awesome I'd like to share.

IC cracked and photographed by Zer0X

Wow, incredible!!!
Now we know that InterWave was born in Texas! 😀

There have been probably some pieces of 'small' art not yet found on chips. 😀

hard1k wrote:

Wow, incredible!!!
Now we know that InterWave was born in Texas! 😀

Throughout the 80's and 90's, the Richardson area (suburb of Dallas) was known as the "Silicon Prairie". Companies like Texas Instruments, Cyrix, id Software, and others called it home. This combined with the Austin area companies like Dell, Compaq, Motorola, and AMD have played a huge part of not only Texas' history, but the whole world's.

Wow, cool 😀

amazing!