MOON8 - Dark Side of the Moon cover

Yes, it sold for $45 plus $5-7 shipping (depended on region).


I was trying to avoid going into it, but I received a disturbing e-mail today from a buyer complaining that I was planning to make more, because apparently the presumed scarcity was what motivated him to buy it. This seriously offended me, as my goal is to get this in the hands of anybody who wants it at as fair a price as possible. (This is also why I released the ROM and source freely.)

Anyhow, I was going to explain why I think this is a fair price, but then I thought I'd do something better and "open source" my breakdown here, since this would probably be interesting to anyone who wants to build carts.

Parts cost per unit, on a batch of 25:

$4.00 - Ciclone from retrousb
$4.00 - ReproPak from retrousb
$4.00 - Case from retrousb
$1.56 - Shipping from retrousb to Canada
$1.60 - Taxes/duty on retrousb parts
$1.22 - Adhesive printed label from local print shop
$3.42 - OTP 27C020 (PRG-ROM) from Mouser
$1.41 - 62256 (CHR-RAM) from Mouser
$0.28 - 74HC161 (AOROM mapper) from Mouser
$0.25 - Capacitors from Mouser
$0.80 - Shipping from Mouser
$0.43 - Shipping envelope from eBay
$0.33 - Adhesive shipping label from eBay
$2.13 - Royalties for cover album from Limelight
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Total: $25.43

Between gathering parts, burning EPROMs, soldering, assembling carts, and testing, I did not keep a good record of my time spent, but I think each cart takes an average of 40 minutes to produce. About 20 minutes of that are spent soldering, though I had many fail initially that worked after some additional time resoldering them.

On 25 carts I had 3 failures I was unable to fix, and have withheld 4 working carts from sale in case any need to be replaced.

The flat rate shipping prices I offered were slightly less than the actual cost of shipping via Canada Post (I rounded down to the nearest whole number). For the purposes of this calculation, I'll ignore the difference.

Sales: $810.00 ( $45 x 18 )
Parts: $635.75 ( $25.43 x 25 )
Difference: $174.25
Labour: 17 hrs ( 40 min x 25 )
Wage: $10.25/hr ( $174.25 / 17 )

There are a number of costs not included here, some are one time costs like an EPROM burner, a soldering iron, tools, powerpak, etc. I am not really sure how much solder I used, maybe $0.25 worth per cart? Also, obviously I did not include programming time, or any of the time I spent originally making the music (this is probably well over 100 hours, maybe 10 of which was programming this ROM).

So, ignoring all the setup costs, at $45 this is a minimum wage job. I'm not really complaining about that, as I'm doing this for fun and am satisfied as long as I'm not losing money at it, but I think you can see why I was offended by someone complaining that their collector's item isn't going to be "collectible" enough. I want make this cart as accessible as possible to people.


There are a number of ways to cut costs. If I'm lucky I will have fewer failures in the next batch, and fewer that need to be reworked after the first soldering. I had some problems with my soldering iron as well, especially with the through holes on the PCB that were attached to the ground plane. I eventually got a more appropriate tip for my iron, and developed a bit better technique, but I'm hoping there aren't latent failure cases in the ones I sent out.

Some have suggested donor carts as an alternative to retrousb new parts, but this is $15/cart vs whatever the cost of donor carts and probably at least 20 minutes of labour desoldering the chips and removing the label, provided you can even find large quantities of cheap carts with the right mappers, and presuming the failure rate isn't even higher with donors. (Also you have to be willing to destroy existing games, obviously.) I don't really think I'd want to try that route for more than one or two carts. For making 20 or 100, I think new parts are the way to go.

If I was making a batch of 100, that's about the point where is seems to be worthwhile to have my own PCB made. Not sure about plastic cases. The Ciclone I don't have the knowledge/ability to replace, and probably you'd need to make 1000 of them to be worthwhile? Other electronics parts get slightly cheaper at 100 units. For my smaller quantities, retrousb's parts are as cost effective as it gets, I think, if you aren't willing to scavenge donors.

There's about $2 worth of royalties per unit necessary for these that wouldn't be for an original game.


Also, one seller bought several carts. In retrospect I think I should have cancelled this sale, as this was unfair to others given the limited quantity, but at the time I felt obligated to go through with it. On future runs there will be a limit of one per customer. I really hope the person who bought so many is not planning to scalp them at a higher price, and I am sorry for not cancelling their order.