The predecessor to the SuperH is the H8 family of devices, which notably included H8/3292, the microcontroller in the Lego Mindstorms RCX. Obviously an irrelevant implementation detail to 99% of users, but deeply important if you were one of those weirdos who compiled BrickOS for your system so that your Lego robot could run a real C program, and even moreso if you needed to rewrite parts of your program in native assembly language to make it run fast enough to be usable.<p>(This was me, in my bedroom at age 16, furiously preparing a robot capable of playing Connect-4 for an rtlToronto Lego robotics competition called Deep Yellow...)
>The rest of this page explains how to compile and install a "bitstream" file to implement this processor in a cheap (about $50) FPGA board, then how to build Linux for that board and boot it to a shell prompt.<p>>Numato: The cheapest usable FPGA development board ($50 US) the j2 build system currently targets is the Numato Mimas v2 (also available on amazon). It contains a Xlinux "Spartan 6" LX9 FPGA that can run a J2 at 50mhz, 64 megs of SDRAM, USB2 mini-B, and a micro-sd card slot.<p>PDS: Nice!<p>But, it would be an additional serious "would be nice"(!) -- if this could run on Lattice FPGA's / IceStorm Open Source Toolchain:<p><a href="https://www.latticesemi.com/Products" rel="nofollow">https://www.latticesemi.com/Products</a><p><a href="http://www.clifford.at/icestorm/" rel="nofollow">http://www.clifford.at/icestorm/</a><p><a href="https://github.com/YosysHQ/icestorm" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/YosysHQ/icestorm</a>
Previously on HN:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12105913" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12105913</a><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20658584" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20658584</a><p>Is the project still alive? There's no news for over 4 years.
There's some activity in the FPGA retrogaming emulation community about the Sega Saturn and other consoles that use the SH2, along with FPGA reimplementations of the graphics chips: <a href="https://twitter.com/srg320_/status/1363880878263443457" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/srg320_/status/1363880878263443457</a><p>I wonder if this is the CPU core that's being used.
So this feels like it begs the question: What's the big deal with RISC-V if this exists? If we've had a Linux-capable BSD-licensed patent-free processor since 2015, why did we spend so much time and effort and money to make another completely new ISA?