Midsummer Speculation

[+cubanismo]

I just noticed the Midsummer reference manual was included in @Stephen Moss's updated docs release, and browsed through it a little bit. Man, that would have been a different class of machine entirely. It's too bad we didn't get a retail release of that one.

 

Just speculating, but I sort of wonder if the J-RISC C compiler that eventually got released for Jaguar was actually just a preview of what they were preparing for the Jaguar II SDK given the main CPU (RCPU) was going to be a third J-RISC processor in that one with (gasp!) a cache added to allow it to run C code efficiently from DRAM. That would partially explain why it was still in such a buggy state, e.g., why they didn't really bother trying to work around some of the J-RISC bugs present in the Tom+Jerry iterations of J-RISC. Sure, they probably rushed it out, but maybe they never intended to fix those issues anyway because they didn't really intend for it to be useful on Jaguar I and just released it against their better judgement due to popular demand/complaints about difficulty of development on the DSP and GPU.

[ChrisM]

Would you be willing to post some specifics and any commentary about them?  Really curious as to what the potential of that chipset might have been