Re: Availability of SH hardware?

[Rich Felker <dalias@libc.org>]

On Thu, Mar 17, 2016 at 10:10:26AM +0100, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
> Hi Rich!
> 
> On 03/17/2016 04:24 AM, Rich Felker wrote:
> > I'm working on the J-Core (currently J2) open hardware revival of the
> > SH architecture and don't have any original SH hardware (except
> > perhaps embedded in old appliances). Does anyone have pointers (direct
> > add-to-cart'able links) to where SH dev boards are still available, or
> > even better, any old hardware lying around that's not being used that
> > you'd be willing to donate?
> 
> I have acquired SuperH hardware in the past and I have good contacts
> to people in Japan. I will help you getting a board, but it may take
> a while.
> 
> Since Renesas dropped support for SuperH completely, they don't have
> any evaluation boards left. In fact, I own the last board that they
> had in stock.

Am I correct that the chips are still available, just not as part of
eval/dev boards, so that in theory, if someone wanted to, they could
make their own board? Or are they completely out of distribution? I
ask mainly from a standpoint of gauging the theoretical possibility of
new users for the original SH models.

> So, with Renesas out of the picture, sources for SuperH hardware would
> be either open source people in Japan who used to work for Renesas -
> I know, for fact, that Renesas hired lots of people in Japan to work
> on SuperH support in Linux - or third-party companies like emtrion [1]
> or Alpha Project in Japan [2]. Another option would be getting an
> old LANDisk device which can also be used to run Debian's sh4 port [3].
> 
> I have already forwarded your mail to a friend in the Japanese Debian
> community and asked him to post a mail in Japanese on their mailing
> lists asking for people who are willing to donate hardware.
> 
> We will find something for you :).

Great, thank you very much!

Rich