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http://www.pad2pad.com/
A printed circuit board manufacturer providing all your custom printed circuit board

http://www.olimex.com/
Electronic design and PCB sub-contract assembly

http://www.eurocircuits.com/
PCB manufacturing; verified a la carte on demand specifications ...also...

http://www.emachineshop.com/
Machine shop to create custom parts, products and prototypes

http://www.tapplastics.com/
TAP Plastics specialize in fiberglass resins and fabrics for fiberglass repair, plastic containers, and custom fabrication

(non-affiliation yadda yadda goes here)

There are already a number of small-amount manufacturers, as you call them. Some are prototyping shops, some will build any number of items for you.

http://www.emachineshop.com/
http://www.tapplastics.com/
http://www.pad2pad.com/
http://www.olimex.com/
http://www.eurocircuits.com/
(no affiliation to any of them)

But you have to supply a sellable idea that's not been done yet, and bear the cost of iterating the bugs out of the design.

Also, and more to the point, the burden of IP is on your shoulders; at least, they're just punching out parts on your behalf and AFAIK that's not been contested in court as of yet.

No, you have that right now.

Every hear of Pad2Pad.com?

If you can do the layout, they'll make your board for you. Yes, it is kind of expensive for hobby projects, but for a computer motherboard it's not *terribly* bad. A commercially made motherboard is still cheaper, but I guess if you want something without DRM, you're always welcome to implement it yourself.

Now, the only problem is that implementing and debugging a computer from scratch could be a rather time consuming undertaking. But, if you've got the time, there are places who will build it for you, whatever *it* is.

Again, name one app that runs on Windows that you can't find an equivalant app for Macs.

A competent PCB design package. A competent Atmel AVR simulator. Games. A half-decent usenet client. At least, that's the stuff that I miss having now that I don't use Windows any more. Oh, to have Agent and AVRStudio and on-line FPS again *sob*.

Spending less than a minute on Google, though I don't know how well they are I found some PCB design apps:

• PCB 123
• Pad2Pad
• DesignWorks Professional for the Macintosh and iMac
• AutoTRAX EDA

Short of a clean room, what more do you want?

http://www.pad2pad.com/
http://www.custompcb.com/
http://www.reprise.com/host/circuits/ecb.asp
http://www.google.com/search?q=custom+circuit+boar d&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8

http://www.pad2pad.com/

You can design your computer at home, and have someone build it to order.

Even better, if you ask me.

...it's that hardware intended for kids is usually useless for anything else. I've seen quite a few electronic gizmos in recent years, and every time I look at hacking them into a more general purpose device, I find that they are far too mission specific to be of any real-world use. Half the time you open them up and find nothing more than a chip, small PCB, and some epoxy holding the whole thing together.

If you're interested in replicating this, it might make a "fun" home project to build one using services like Pad2Pad, Digikey, and a handful of parts. Once you have the design down, you can sell them in bulk for a similar cost. Perhaps even as "developer kits" that allow others to fool around with them. Just don't waste your time on a toy. :-/

Hardware involves real and significant material costs. Big difference.

Really? Silly me, all I thought I needed was a testing board and some hardware descriptions.

Thanks to FPGAs, complete hardware designs can be written (in source code no less!), downloaded directly to the chip, tested, and then sold for a profit without ever speaking to a chip fab or hardware factory. And places like Pad2Pad allow for custom test boards to be built for a VERY low cost.

If the Open Graphics Hardware project needs a million smackers, then they better damn well have a shippable product on their hands.

Hardware is quite a bit different then software, being a physical tangible item that isn't easily copied/manufactured.

Tell that to Pad2Pad. I can send them a computer file, and they can send me back a complete board (or run of boards).

In fact, hardware has become closer to software than you think. Thanks to languages such as VHDL and Verilog, you can *code* a chip and test it without ever pressing a piece of hardware. And if you use an FPGA, you can litterally download the chip design into the processor and have a working model of your design.

If you ever hear about "chip IP", they're referring to the practice of developing a chip design and then selling the design to hardware manufacturers. ARM is a particularly well known exmaple of this.

From what I remember from my neural networks days the human brain/neocortex works so well because of its massively parallel nature (not because of the processing power of any one neuron), and that computers simply aren't able to exploit this as they aren't designed to work like this

Computers aren't *normally* designed like this. They can be however, and in recent years have been moving in that direction. When neural networks were first being researched, a Cray supercomputer was about the closest you could get to that sort of parallelism. Fast forward to today and we find that Intel (Pentium), AMD (AMD64), Sun (Sparc), and Sony (Emotion Chip) are all building machines that are highly parallel in nature.

Even more interesting is that today you can build yourself a custom, massively parallel computer on a shoestring budget. All you need is a handful of FPGAs, a PCB layout service like Pad2Pad, a few other parts, and reasonable VHDL or Verilog skills. That's more or less what OpenRT did to build their SaarCORE architecture. :-)

This means you can use surface mount devices, ball grid arrays, and other advanced packages. Finally! They do all the things you can't do at home, like X-ray inspection of BGA soldering.

ou may think it wouldn't take much R&D to develop an SNES-equivalent console

It doesn't. I've been looking into the issue and here's what I found:

- Fully featured, ARM-based boards are cheap and easy to acquire. Most fit in 2"x3".

- Linux or NetBSD can be leveraged for controlling the board.

- USB can be used for a simple interface for controllers. This would even allow PC style controllers to be plugged in.

- "Smart cards" are very cheap and easy to acquire on the market. Their only drawback is the relatively low amount of data they can hold. (8K - 1MB)

- Controllers parts and the case be easily manufactured using eMachineShop for the plastics. Pad2pad can be used for the controller circuit boards. Microswitches or rubber button paddings can be obtained from a variety of manufacturers.

In short, a guy in his garage could develop such a console in a few months time. The problem with NES consoles is that they're cutting edge. When the SNES was new, they had to build custom hardware to produce something cheap enough for the features they needed. Similarly, Nintendo also had to spend a lot of money on new low-power display technologies for the GameBoy line of consoles. Sega had a handheld console more powerful than the gameboy years ago, but it failed due to size, battery life, and fragility.