This is Joe Z. I have a cartridge design I'm putting into production. I am actively working on making it available to a wide audience so that anyone can self-publish with ease. I don't have the bandwidth to sell these personally as "Left Turn Only", so I'm researching other options. I'll still publish my own games under that banner.
As with so many things in this arena, it's a labor of love. I was hoping to be at this point over a year and a half ago, but the economy tanked, work went absolutely nuts, and I had to shelve things. The economy's back now, and there are a bunch of exciting, material developments the last few months. (Not just talk... I've got beaucoup $$$ out there in active production.)
Like David mentioned, we're not in a position to announce dates. But, I've moved forward with hardware production, so the rest is just a matter of time. If I can open up the capability to a wider audience, even better. I'm actively pursuing options there so that I'm not the bottleneck. My new design is flash based and in-circuit programmable, which makes it easier to fan out to a large audience. It also supports unimaginably large games (at least in terms of ROM size), so I doubt hardware should be much of a limitation ever again. If it is, I can make a better design. 16K bytes RAM, 240K bytes ROM though should be enough to hold people for a few years.... :-)
BTW, I did actually receive a couple entries to my programming contest. Not as many as I hoped, but a couple. Now that I'm moving to hardware production, I can make good on the prizes I wanted to offer. I had wanted to move to production in 2007 originally, slipped to 2008, and then had to totally can things until 2010 due to the economy (all my savings "disappeared") and an oppressive work situation. I'm back now. :-)
That's a shot in the arm for those of us like myself who aren't so hardware-inclined. :-)