It does make sense, perhaps due to weird Chinese shenanigans with imports and other garbage (though they seem to care less about pirate crap going out) maybe it's easier to sell a bag of his custom chips, then the Chinese put them on their own board. In that way the firmware on the old chips could be something he locked due to the contracted deal with that group so they can offer it at a far cheaper price. Which in turn since now aliexpress is a thing unlike a couple years ago that people globally go after it's a way to get the thing on the cheap. The loss is no firmware updates, but seriously, what update could have been made in the last year or two worth a crap that is going to stop a game from running, saving properly, or some other oddball quirk? The Genesis was very vanilla if you think about it, nothing crazy going on like Nintendo with their open ended designs and bag full of special chips that are a complete bitch to emulate and even worse to get a copier cart to work (ie: SNES no SA1, no FX1/2, no SDD1, etc.) Your big deal here is trusting a Chinese company not to jack your info, and waiting on it a month to arrive and hoping it didn't get hosed in the mail.