It’s really a single-board computer, analogous an 8-bit Raspberry Pi. Not expensive for a SBC, but not as cheap as I would expect an 8-bit thing with vga would be.

Being that 8-bit processors have been gone from interactive systems for so long, anything under a couple of hundred dollars would have been “cheapest.” It would just have to come in under the price of the 80s systems. I could win the same kind of contest by making a 5-bit machine at any price!