At 5:14 PM -0400 9/7/01, Gary Fisher wrote:
>Speaking of the M32R/D, every link I've found leads to nebulous marketing
>info or a dead end.  Does anyone here know just what the Squeak - M32R/D
>association produced?

It produced a fully functional Squeak VM that ran on an M32R/D prototyping
board. It was the work of a summer intern at Mitsubishi's lab in Silicon Valley.
When Alan came by to see it, he immediately took over the mouse and proceeded
to give a full Squeak demo to the Mitsubishi execs. All the basics worked, including
sound output.

I don't know what happened to the M32R/D project; I haven't heard much about
it and get the impression that Mitsubishi has stopped working on it. There may be
some fabrication issues, since they had to do something tricky to get DRAM and
the processor on the same silicon substrate. (I don't know much about wafer
fab, but I gather that DRAM and CPU's use different processes.)

We did another "bare chip" Squeak VM port at Disney. Jamie Robertson ported
Squeak to a StrongARM developer's board. He wrote the display driver, touch
screen driver, timer support, and basic access to a FAT16 file system on a
compact flash card and it worked pretty nicely. There were some issues with
noise in the touch-screen hardware that he had to overcome, but the effort only
took three or four weeks. We didn't bother with sound I/O.

	-- John