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.

Just a small update; we've been working hard at getting the core of PJIT ready to boot up before receiving our first batch of boards. Getting the AM3358 up and running without the benefit of JTAG has been … interesting. To date we have:

• working clock reconfiguration
• set up of all the caches and mmu
• a timer by which we can measure performance
• our first runs of PJIT with the BogoMIPS test

Ooh it's been a busy month! But we have our first boards in ready to get all populated. We did have one small snafu with the wrong footprint for our Flash memory that might put us a little behind schedule, but nothing world-ending. Despite this, I think this looks really good for our first, officialy production boards.

There seems to be a bit of confusion with Buffee and perhaps that's my fault. My father's favourite saying is, "a word to the wise should suffice" and to me, that always meant be terse and to the point and people should figure it out. I've mastered the art of being terse to the point of sometimes not saying much at all – so I'll say it here, loud and clear – the Buffee supports everything your Amiga can do right now.

This is the first part is a three part series that will be doing a bit of a deeper dive into the mechanics of PJIT in contrast to existing emulation technologies. Part two will be "Why is PJIT Slow" and will compare PJIT to bleeding edge 68K JIT engines like Emu68 and UAE. Part three will be "Why is PJIT Quicker" and will explain the overhead of JIT and why PJIT doesn't have this problem.