Hi everyone! I’ve been getting this question in different forms lately.
“Could you tell me when you’ ‘ll plan to produce more units?”
“Are y’all honing to restock?”
“I’m sending this e-mail to know if there are any planned builds of the Wonderswan Flashmasta soon.”
You get the picture.
I normally want to respond to people individually, but that has become problematic lately. I just checked, as I type this, and I’m almost 2 weeks behind on responding to all my emails. I decided to write a post here and then just send a link to this page whenever someone asks about the status.
As you can imagine, if I can’t seem to respond to emails, I probably also can’t seem to make time to order parts and build boards. Combine that with some demotivating factors, and I really honestly don’t know when the next batch will be built.
One big demotivating factor is cost. The price of some of the main chips has gone up drastically over the last couple years (and even more since we last ordered).
The main demotivating factor (for this project) is time. My family is in the middle of building a new house (near our current house). That has taken a lot of my family time, and even when we’re ready to move, the move itself and the preparation to sell our current house is going to be exhausting.
Oh, did I mention the fact that I am not doing this as a full-time job? Maybe some of you expected that, but we (Andrew and I) actually did this (and Freeplaytech.com and some other projects) as our full-time gig for years. We (with some help here and there) did all the design work and all the manufacturing. A guy named Ryan also contributed to the design and 3D printing of the plastic shells.
Both Andrew and I were hired near the end of 2022 to work full-time for another company. When that happened, I honestly expected to build WS/NGPC carts and such as more of a side gig. I thought that it would just take a bit longer and we would have to focus on manufacturing more and design less. The reality is that it’s been super hard to focus on any of that.
No. I am not saying that we’re halting production. We’re working on other options to get things produced. It’s just really difficult to even move that forward at a steady pace lately.
What I am saying is that I have no idea when we might have more WonderSwan carts available. We built a lot of NGPC carts before all this went down, so we still have those in stock. I know you want WonderSwan flash carts, and I know that people are ready to purchase them when we make more. I just need to ask for patience with all that. It could take a while to get production and my life back into a state that gets these carts built.
I really wanted to tough it out. I really kept thinking that we’d just get to it. I feel bad that we’re letting down people like you in this retro gaming community by not having these available. I just can’t focus on making it a top priority right now.
Thanks for your understanding!
Ed
UPDATE (Aug 9): We should now have all the parts necessary to build a new batch. I’m hoping that we can start that process in the next week or two.
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