Comment 3 for bug 342667

I wonder why a non-working version is in the repositories to begin with.

For my application I need to use the 3069 because that's what is on the board I need to develop on. This is the first time I've developed on an H8 since I was in school, and at that point the tool chain was a snap to build. It's a shame it's no longer maintained. I grabbed the newest version from 秋月電子 today from a friend to see if that would work, binutils built but gcc refused to configure because my system is AMD-64 which is an unknown architecture for that version. I'm running the windows version in a virtualbox install now, which is less than preferable but I'll make do for now. I'd consider HEW but that would blow my budget and betray my love for the GNU toolchain.

 Depending on your application moving to AVR may not be hard at all, and the GNU toolchain for AVR is very well developed and the packages are all there in the repositories. It's hard to compare core architectures for the H8 and AVR, but I'd say AVR and H8 occupy the top positions in the 8-bit arena in terms of core efficiency. However, if you have an application that requires a particular feature, like DMA or CAN, or an embedded OS like uITron or HOS the AVR devices that support such features are limited in number compared to the H8 series. If your application isn't dependent on particular features not found in AVR I would recommend grabbing a programmer (the AVR-ISP II ran me something like 4,000 yen, and even the most full featured programmers will not run you much more than about 30,000 yen I believe). Writing to the chips and interfacing with them is quite different, but if you are just writing flash with a simple programmer you don't need to worry about run modes and what not. You can actually continually write to flash on a live circuit without touching it, and it resets after each write so it makes real world adjustment and debugging a pleasure. I really wish Renesas would embrace the Open Source/GNU community as much as Atmel has.