Hey Everyone,
I apologize for not posting this sooner but things have been pretty hectic here lately and I’ve only just managed to get things back in order (sort of :-) ).
So basically since my last post I have been able to contact both aPEX and Andrew to ask about the Phoenix board and what they think about doing another production. While I haven’t had much response from Andrew yet (we’ve only exchanged about one or two emails so far) I have spoken with aPEX a few times and he has been able to provide me with a good deal of information. So with his permission I thought I’d share what I’ve learned so far:
1) Currently there are no (or almost no) PCB boards left to make more Phoenix Motherboards. The defective/incomplete boards that were discussed before (see previous phoenix threads) were actually the boards that Andrew used to make Phoenix boards for the A1k.org users.
So if a new production was going to be done it would have to be done from scratch (aka all new boards with all new parts).
2) In speaking with aPEX it seems that (in his opinion) it will be very difficult (if not impossible) to find many of the necessary parts to assemble all new boards.
“[…]in my opinion a complete new production run seems impossible. Parts
and making such big blank boards are expensive, really expensive. In Europe it
is hard to get the needed memory and the FatAgnus 8372B (needed for 2MB chip) is sold-out world wide”
3) Production may also be difficult as it seems not all motherboard fixes/patches can be found in the Phoenix Diagrams.
Now given all this aPEX did offer the following suggestions if we were still interested in trying to produce more boards:
1) “To get an acceptable price you need about 100 units... and some good partner to
layout the board and so on...“
2) If we reached those numbers we may be looking at a price of about 500 dollars per person per board. (sorry no currency was specified but I’d assume 500 US to be on the safe side)
So that’s basically where we are at right now but I do have to emphasize that these numbers are not fixed in stone. They could well change if we were able to procure all of the necessary components for the boards at a reasonable price but I must admit it does look a bit grim.
So I guess the question now is, do we want to move forward with this project or are we better off waiting for Jens Schoenfeld to release his Clone-A project (perhaps in a year or two) and adapt it to work inside an Amiga 1000 case?
What do you guys think?
Techie
edit: if you are still interested in a Phoenix board please sign up on the Revival website
here
