I think there is a market and small void to fill, but I think it is with the games, not the systems.
There's already plenty of systems. There's probably enough 2nd hand genesis systems to supply entire population of people interested in this already, and then there are all the brazil-made duo-systems and retro-gen systems out there. The systems are covered.
Remaking old chips is expensive. If you had to make the asic yourself, it would run about 2 million dollars, and at these volumes each chip would cost 100's of dollars. But you could emulate the whole thing in an ARM A8 micro or fpga for 20$.
I think the fun and market is in the games. We need to produce new fun games for old systems. This will create a positive feedback as it will convince people to go buy the old consoles to play new games, and then they will want even more new games.
I think it would be fun because the games we make could be focused on fun gameplay and aesthetically pleasing 16-bit graphics, rather than shallow visual-fest interactive cinema or family-friendly throw-away titles of the modern day systems.
The problem is that you could also do this for the download sections of the current gen systems. As most of them are releasing old games as downloads. The problem is they just don't play, look, or feel right. You need the original controller. And you need the original video output. The biggest problem is they are just lost in the crowd. There's so much for download now, it's not easy for a low-budget gameplay-centered non-licensed game to stand out. But it would stand out if it was released as a cart for an old system.
Now I think carts are expensive and difficult to make. I think the games should be released on CDRs for the Sega CD. They they can contain great audio tracks, have additional support for rotation and more colors, and still support all the genesis features. I also think releasing 32X-CDs would be a great way to add more colors and power, and some better polygon crunching or more sprites on scren.
I think a lot of turbo-CD or neo-geo games could be ported to a 32X-CD. Or at least games along those vibes.
It would be difficult to actually turn a profit, it would need to be more of a hobby mostly funded by another venture. Maybe making the games open-source would allow creating the games themselves be almost free, and then you can probably make enough revenue to support a small distributon and marketing channel.
If profit is the desire, I think the next big market will be downloadable phone games. They'll surpass even console games in sales within a few years, if they haven't already. We probably will not see any more portable consoles after the next round of PSP2 and 3DS, it'll all be phones after that. But that's a sell out to the retro gaming community in my eyes!
, if anything i would bring the genesis, and the sega cd back into production
