You should go and trawl the bbs and read up on this. We have covered this ground again and again.

But in summary:

The hardware really isn't the hard part*, there are several people here on the bbs who could probably design a working empeg main board. If someone decided to make new empegs they wouldn't want to exactly duplicate the main board anyway, given that some of the chips aren't made any more.

The software is the issue. All the many man years of effort that went into make empeg as good as it is are locked up in the player code. And we don't have the source to that.

So the best that someone making new empegs now could hope for is a new main board design, with tweaks to the Linux kernel drivers to make the empeg player code think it was running on the old hardware.

Making new empegs just to run the existing player code seems a fairly pointless exercise, given that there doesn't seem to be a high demand for the existing ones (they change hands at less than $200). Sure you'd gain the ability to sync data onto it faster and you might get some spare memory to run extra apps alongside the player, but you'd still be running the old player code so the rest of the functionality would still be the same.



* at least if you are "God" or "God"-like