I have many words for the last year, none of which I can really express here. Suffice to say that this "chip shortage" has pushed back retail production run into January – at least at this point – I believe nothing anyone's saying until I have boards physically in hand. Despite the delays, our beta testing is going along well, but very, very slowly. We're still waiting for the last of the beta boards to come in before we begin shipping, and I absolutely appreciate everyone's patience with this. Software is coming along nicely and we have good timing on the bus and can read and write, so that's progress!

I'm not one to brag, but when I mess up, I mess up like no one else. But before I start committing seppuku, let me tell you the good news: we got the beta's in and managed to power them up. And wow, do they look gorgeous!

With a ton of testing behind us, we've pushed on to the second round of Buffee boards and have officially submitted the order for sixty beta Buffees. While we had hoped that the alpha version would just work, we were not so lucky and Buffee v0.5 has a new little friend – a GreenPAK SPLD (Simple Programmable Logic Device) and we've ensured that on this version every signal that is not bound to the SPLD, is bound to the PRU (Programmable Realtime Unit) which is almost as good as the SPLD, just not quite as fast. This doesn't mean the alpha boards are useless though!

In the last part of the series we put PJIT up against the state-of-the-art 68000 emulator for ARM that used the traditional interpreter style of emulation, Cyclone 68000, and found PJIT to be rather compelling. But one cannot ignore the raw performance of a true JIT.