I would like to echo AmigaDave's comments and say that I think, actually, it is quite incredible what MikeJ has been able to achieve so far. For one person to personally design, and then build, refine, source a supplier for components, arrange a business deal to get it produced in quantity, arrange funding to pay for it all, and then get a production run of 50 units produced, and then personally thoroughly test each one, and then ship them all out himself without any support from any other person...is quite incredible!! Especially if, as I believe, MikeJ is holding down a full time job at the same time.
I realise it is very frustrating that we can't all have our new wonder-Amigas
right now, and the frustration you're expressing it probably made worse by all the false promises of the past by other vendors - promised machines which never materialised - but this isn't MikeJ's fault. He's in many ways done a lot more than any single person alone would ordinarily be able to achieve. I for one am very impressed by his work so far!
I am sure he would like to order hundreds of these boards and ship them all out, but I suspect he probably wants to see how gets on with 50 for now. There's only so much a single person can handle at a time. It's a lot of work, and I'm sure what he doesn't want to do is to end up ordering 1,000 of these boards, and then find he can't test so many units all by himself, and has tp ship them out as-is, and find that many have faults which cost a lot to fix (for example.) Or to find he can't sell all of them and would make a massive loss on this project.
The responsible thing to do, in my opinion, is exactly what he has done. That is: to produce a limited run of boards to begin with, so that he can then personally test them all, and start sending them out to customers, and then see how the units perform 'in the wild', and see what the reaction is like from his customers. IF it all goes well, and there are no problems, and all the units perform as expected.. and there's still a lot of demand for the Replay.. and he's confident enough to place a much larger order, and be able to trust and rely upon the workmanship of the factory producing them without personally testing hundreds of units, then he'll be able to ship out more... THEN he can place that much larger order, and everyone can get the Replay they desire.
I think we need to ask ourselves, could we do what MikeJ has done? Do we have the skills to develop a board like this? Would we have the patience to work at it for so long? Would we be prepared to travel abroad and sign business deals, personally test 50 units, etc? We should't expect from others what we couldn't imagine doing ourselves. MikeJ's done a lot more than most of us could ever do, and he's created an amazing little board with so much potential. Let's cut him a little slack, give him a chance. Let's not expect perfection or demand the impossible. He's doing the best he can, and he's done a remarkable job so far at that IMO
