Gold

PC-98 games generally only had 16 colours available, so it would be most faithful to stick to that anyways.

I've always been worried about the idea about using only through hole components as it was going to cost too much to assemble, and trying to shoulder the burden of building 1000+ units seems unsustainable to me. Everyone has already put in a lot of effort into the project already and you have almost reached an important milestone, so I also feel that not doing anything with the phase 1 design will be a waste. It think its best if you just offer it as a kit without warranty to let the people who are interested buy it and build it themselves, or they can just wait for the next phase. With a kit you also wouldn't have to worry about any EMC testing required by the FCC which is even that much harder to pass with a large motherboard design with through hole components. I feel like bringing out the x8 would create a divide for a product that isn't even released yet. Its good to be able to focus your efforts onto the one product instead. I think you should also refocus your efforts onto your end goal too. There's a lot of development work that will have to be spent on phase 2 which can be used to work on phase 3 instead that can be mass produced the easiest. My suggestion is to finish phase 1 of the project, sell it as a kit to those that want expansion, an authentic retro feel et c. and start work on phase 3 to sell to everyone else. I think its also sad to see the FM chip go. I've never been that interested in the case, so I don't mind it going. If you decide to sell it as a kit, I'm sure people won't mind that they have to source their own case to go along with it. The PS/2 keyboard seems like a nice addition but you also don't want to waste your down payment for no reason. Given that the x8 doesn't support PS/2, that's a significant amount of money spent on something that isn't even usable in its current state.

I've mostly been learning with gforth in the mean time. It seems like eforth (and by extension xforth) doesn't have a greater than word as default, is there any particular reason for that? All the ">" word seems to do is push 7 onto the stack.

Awesome, I've been waiting for a Forth to be available on the x16. Looking forward to finally getting around to learning it.

I'm not a fan of C, but I have been using cc65 as that's what looks like to have the greatest support. I would like to learn and use forth, but none are available currently.

Wouldn't assembly cost a lot given that the motherboard is all through hole?