The Ware for September 2018 is shown below.

Been a busy month banging my head against the wall of getting FCC/CE certification for NeTV2, and spending thousands of dollars on dozens of tests — more time, effort, and treasure than developing the product itself. This is my least favorite aspect of product development — the regulatory burdens are just so immense if you actually try to comply with all the rules, especially with such a global marketplace (every region you legally serve multiplies your paperwork load, not to mention different SKUs for power supplies & manual/packaging translations).

Rather ironic to have finally figured out all the technical tricks to make production in small batches efficient, only to find there’s no efficient way to deal with regulatory hurdles. It’s a discouraging message for small-time makers and innovators, and tilts things in the favor of large corporations with the funding and scale to build internal certification teams and facilities to make the regulatory process efficient and predictable.

The Ware for August 2018 is Micom router, with an EasyRouter HCF feature pack installed. It’s interesting how the ROM cartridge drew many people to the conclusion this was some sort of an old laser printer motherboard thanks to the ancient practice of purchasing fonts as physical ROM cartridges — I would have thought the same initially, except most laser printers also have a pretty substantial general purpose CPU built into them, and there isn’t enough RAM on board either for that type of application. SAM nailed it — I only slightly blurred some of the numbers to try and give something to search for, as Micom is a pretty obscure company and almost everything about this piece of hardware pre-dates modern search engines. Congrats, email me for your prize!

The Ware for August 2018 is shown below.

Thanks to Patricio Worthalter for contributing this ware!

The Ware for July 2018 is an I/O board for the x86-based Sega Nu arcade platform. Congrats to megabytephreak for nailing the ware, email me for your prize! Also props to Vegard for pointing out the JVS connector (the thing that looks like USB but isn’t).

I was curious how certain readers were able to identify this as an arcade-related ware, and the answer I received is that the I/O breakout board is the key — the DIP switches and push-buttons are typical of how arcade machines are configured and serviced, and the JVS connector, if you can recognize it, is a dead give-away. The coin cell for retaining configs & high scores even if the power is pulled is also a potential tell. You learn something new every day!