I really want to make a NES cart for my own usage (NOT FOR RETAIL), and am looking for various ways. I have found many, but ALL of them require a donor. To me, this feels counter intuitive. You make a copy of a rare NES game for more NES games, but destroy an existing common game, rendering it rarer...
Any place to find the IC's, PCBs, and casing, so | can make MY OWN reproduction, and not a total Frankenstein's Monster of a game?
Certainly, for the most common mappers there's fresh chips being produced, with the patents expired. I'm not sure if anyone is selling them in qty 1 though, I've only seen cases sold in ones.
Maybe contact 8-bit evolution and see if they'll sell you some?
Infinite NES Lives and RetroStage produce all-new boards.
There are several discrete mappers used on the NES, which you just use common 7400 series ICs for. There are thousands of places you can get those, but they're usually sold in bulk and you might not always be able to buy just a single IC.
Other mappers on the NES are ASICs, like the MMC1, MMC3, the VRCs, etc. Those you'll probably need somebody's clone or a CPLD implementation.
The CIC clone, the PCB, and the shell, I'm out of the loop on who sells them anymore, but all these things were once sold, so you might be able to find them secondhand?
Not necessarily a donor
cart; I was talking about RetroUSB's repropaks. Someone might've bought some extras and are interested in selling them, or have put them up on ebay or something. In this case, "donor" would mean a person.
As Tepples mentioned, you can buy new cart shells, new PCBs and CIC chips from either of these places:
RetroStageInfiniteNESlives
In China (Aliexpress) here is a company called "PocketGames" that makes carts with New Boards and MMC3 based, you can send a ROM and they makes a game,
Now they are selling the famous Rockman Minus Infinity mapper 4 version
www.aliexpress.com/store/product/New-ar ... 01562.html