Thankfully, custom chips are no longer as much of an expense as they used to be. Thanks to FPGAs getting faster and cheaper, someone working on alternative hardware no longer needs to spend mega-$$$ to mass-produce his new boards. Look at the c-one - it's essentially a home-grown computer that's about as complex as an OCS/ECS Amiga, the production runs are tiny (300 boards), but Jens can sell them for less than $300 each. A decade ago, everything else being the same, that $300 would've been about $10K if not more.
