Quoted from jrcw:I expect that they will stop supporting these parts in 10-20 years. There may be a shortage of these components for a while, but if there is a market then someone will jump in. Either another supplier gets a license to make Stern reproduction boards, or some hobbyist does some reverse engineering and creates a reproduction.
I expect that supporting these widely known machines will not be a problem. It may be more difficult for machines from smaller manufacturers.
My concern is that they keep changing. That makes the market much smaller for each board. And small markets are much more expensive to engineer boards for. If you’re only going to sell 20 boards, it’s not worth the effort. Of do I misunderstand that... can you take a WWE board and put it in AS? Or an AS board and use it in WWE?