Yeah, you will see cases where this happens for specialist components like CPUs that are EOL. The five hundred I have left in the warehouse can be let go for hardly anything, mostly I want that warehouse space back. If you're a hobbyist making one of something for a personal project you don't care. But if you were actually prototyping for a large SKU project and later you want to make a real order - I will have very bad news to break to you. This is why serious players get volume quotes up front and execute on hardware quickly.

The Amigans ran into this when they had the idea that their next generation desktop computer should have the PPC chip people thought Apple was going to put in laptops right before it went x86-only - the PWRficient PA6T-1682M. Getting a few of them for prototyping was easy but there was never going to be a long term supply at a reasonable price. Nobody had a plant manufacturing this CPU since 2008, but the Amigans started needing them in 2010 - so they were soon resorting to playing scavenger hunt "Hey, did you have a box of these anywhere? Can you check? Yes we'll pay the original per-unit price".

Internally they were reassuring each other that hey, these devices are inside US military hardware, Apple assured the US DoD that it would be able to supply replacements. But the ability to send the DoD a few spare CPUs out of a crate you've kept in one corner of a warehouse is not the same thing as continued commercial availability.

I am sympathetic to the situation. I bought my long awaited Amiga 500 about the time the 600/1200 came out. Went up going for the 500 since it had more after market support but the higher res and the 020 would have been nice in the 1200.

One really needs to ensure there will be supply and attainable bulk pricing when building a niche device like this. I understand the desire to use some esoteric part like the PA6T, and with the expectation that it was going into a mass market laptop, that it would be available.

Is there an effort to get Amiga running on RISCV? Custom silicon is also within reach starting at about 1k$ Machines are so damn fast now, you could run the whole thing in emulation, in Wasm inside of Firefox.

The Amigans are fragmented like fifty ways. As a result, and with waning numbers, funding and outside interest, they are mostly going nowhere.

There are several businesses (notionally for profit) fighting over this mess, in court, lying to each other and their fans in public, all that jazz. Some of them claim to own the name "Amiga" in various forms.

The device with a PA6T in it was the AmigaOne X1000, which eventually ran AmigaOS 4.1 update 6 or some similar string of nonsense. So that's a 32-bit, uniprocessor PowerPC operating system, kinda-sorta compatible with the Motorola 68000 series Amiga Workbench versions (aka AmigaOS 3.x)

There are also a bunch of Amigans running an OS called "MorphOS" that is also a 32-bit, uniprocessor PowerPC operating system, from a different outfit, mostly on old PPC Apple desktops or laptops.

Then there's a bunch of Amigans running souped-up Commodore/ Motorola era Amigas with patched up "Amiga OS 3.x" versions, sometimes with PowerPC "accelerators". This is a more ordinary nerd type culture, a lot in common with people who own and operate actual steamrollers, or build their own space rockets as a hobby. Most of them are conscious this is all it is, a weird niche hobby.

And then there are groups building new hardware, often with FPGAs but sometimes other weird ingredients. It seems as though this group might built the thing lots of ordinary people want - which is a box you plug into a TV and then play games you remember as a kid. But much more than for Nintendo when they did that, the Amiga problem is mostly not about technology, it's about _Rights Management_. Those games were produced by a wide variety of different companies many of which no longer exist or are now part of huge console companies that won't let your rival product exist. In some cases the games were licensed, so the license expired and you'd need to get OKs from two or more organisations that are now at exactly cross purposes. Imagine trying to get Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo to all sign off on you selling a product that competes with their consoles. Why would _any_ of them do that, much less all of them? And if you can't secure the rights your product will be much worse than the illegal products available already.