the drag n' derp cart by abrasive (battery-less and drag-and-drop) will be out soon (we all hope!) and its going to be the shit. period.
actually, i think its been long enough you may have missed the everdrive cartridge wave and the effects on making music with a sega genesis this has had. at least playback on hardware.
which brings up Deflemask, as well as little-scale's MIDI device. its been a big recent time for sega products.
the nanoloop revisions are pretty remarkable, there is USB interactivity now (limited, but seems there is potential/interest in meeting community requests) and the 1.x versions dropped the shell for a thicker PCB, sort of dev style.
8bc went to a donation-base, this seems to not work out well with basically the site having rolling downtimes at the end of the month, then it went down, and now there is a big pink bubble holding its place. dunno.
those three albums are also what i've been listening to as well, too good.
finally going to blip myself, would love to see you there if you make it! we've been needing to meet...