There is a new crowd funding project for a mini-NES and what I find most interesting is that the runners of the project claim that the units will use the Ricoh RP2A03 CPU (which has long been out of production). They explicitly state that it will not use an FPGA, or NES-on-a-chip clone.

https://www.crowdsupply.com/tall-dog-el ... cs/tinynes

I can't fathom that the RP2A03 is still being manufactured? Maybe they got a batch from Chinese recyclers?

I always thought it would be fun to fiddle with an RP2A03, the performance Nintendo got out of the 6502 architecture was very impressive in its day.

It's certainly an oddity. I note that the project surfaced more than two years ago, possibly with no updates since.

Kind of a baffling decision anyway, since the 2A03 doesn't contribute anything notable to the architecture other than the audio generator, which was thoroughly dissected in terms of both logic architecture and analog signal peculiarities ages ago. Even the cheap FPGA clones these days sound absolutely identical. (I did have an early Yobo clone years ago that swapped the 50% and 12.5% duty cycles and severely attenuated the PCM channel, but everything I've heard since then has been completely fine.)

I suppose it just might have occurred backwards: someone came across a supply of a couple of hundred salvaged or NOS chips, and that led them to this project. Using 'genuine' chips is, I would think, be a limited extra attraction for most potential customers, so it only really makes commercial sense if it works out cheaper. (It make sense in other senses, I suppose.)

However, it's very much a free market, where people can dream up ideas and try to sell them - or, in this case, perhaps, try first to implement them. There's a lot more to it than getting the chips.