Anything's possible...
The question is, who is gonna design it?

Frans Molenaar

hehe... Many people have been working on new MSX mainboard designs in the past. I think the hadware development scene needs one thing: co-operation. Exchange of ideas, achievements and experience. Using each others knowledge and already-built-hardware to make a new, faster, full-featured yet backwards compatible MSX mainboard/computer.

I for one was really looking forward to the CIEL3++ project, which seemed to be the most promising to me.

I just hope someone decides to make a Turbo-R compatible mainboard... I would hate to give up my R800...

For godness sake. There are other people who have already developed MSX hardware. That is - it's not an MSX YET, but it could easily be done. The Russian SPRINTER (www.petersplus.com - the company seems rather dead right now) is a 20 MHz Z80 based motherboard with ISA slots and an FPGA which just needs to be fed with a config file to implement the MSX chipset, everything else could be done in software. It's got ISA slots and an IDE controller. Its original purpose is to be the ultimate Speccy, but the design's cappable of running pretty much any Z80 based platform. Maybe all they need is a boost in the form of bunch of orders to restart the production.
And then there is the CPCng - a similar, FPGA based Amstrad CPC redesign, which uses the 50 MHz eZ80 . The details are at http://cpcng.gryzor.info/.
Also worth checking is the C-ONE - a C64 redesign also with an FPGA and PCI bus nad is at http://c64upgra.de/c-one/ ...
Wouldn't it be just awesome if ALL the Z80 develpers started to work together so we could have a new, modern and efficient Z80 motherboard which all the "platformists" could readily use and just implement the chipset functions in the FPGA and the firmware in a flash memory? There might also be other applications for such platform like embedded computers and such, the thing could be manufactured in quantities which would bring the prce down, at least bellow an average Athlon/P4 motherboard, and the whole thing might even be MiniATX or MicroITX form factor...
Actually this is why I started the www.sweb.cz/siliconcave/, to put these things in context (if I only had enough time and some knowledge of PHP/MySQL... well anyway, the MSX section is coming soon