I've left the hardware questions for those who're more knowledable in
that area...

> And one last question: I heard Sega was going to release the VMU
devving
> stuff to the public. Anyone has any info on when exactly?

Well, the current problem is that the VM dev tools weren't made in
house by sega, and so they're having to negotiate with the authors
(which seems to be taking a while, and possibly may never get
resolved)

However, the freeware tools made by marcus, john et al, are very good
(and the new directx port of softvms contains a debugger, which will
be handy), so the main push is to get sega to release all the VMU
programming documentation (which would let us make the tools more
correct and compatible, and would also allow for much better games!)

I'm sorry I can't be more specific, but why not read it for yourself
through the vmu-dev list archive on the web (url in the email footer)