Hitachi appears to be burdened with old style dealer/vendor networks. Thus you have to deal with a local vendor or distributor to get anything. So if the vendor doesn't see a lot of money in it, they won't deal with you. Unless it is obsololete or surplus you usually can't get the parts off the internet or through any of the regular internet vendors. Of course maybe there is one I missed. Arrow, Pioneer, Digikey doesn't sell them. Also the Hitachi HEW IDE development environment has a 30 day timelimit on usage, and costs at least $1,200 US to get. There looks to be a GCC version compiler but I haven't tried it yet. No one else seems to have alternate compiler IDE programmer sources for the H8... chips. Which isn't a good sign. Hitachi might be overly repressive on allowing third party languages and IDE's to be developed. Although, I like the Hitachi chips, it doesn't look to be hobbyist friendly, or even whether they want small businesses to use their products. They seem to cater to large corporate accounts. It looks like the PICs, Atmels, Cypress, Cygnal, Ubicom, Dallas Maxim, TI MSP430's, Motorola H08Q series have effectively out manuevered Hitachi in the MCU markets. It would help more if their web site was easier to navigate through. Other than that, they are pretty neat chips. I wanted to use the 16bit H8's for quite a while now. Really nice for easy 16bit ADC readings.

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Sometimes someone on Ebay puts up some H8's for sale. There is a company in Europe with some development boards for sale now. IAR has a compiler but it appears to be expensive. It may be the same one Hitachi is promoting too. There is the GCC cross compiler which looks pretty good. Hitachi has a "board in the bag" H8tiny promotion going, but you have to get it through your local distributor. Hitachi has finally gotten their H8tiny 64k limited edition IDE compiler available. It's somewhere on their website, you'll have to hunt for it. Earlier they had it available but the way it was worded made it seem like it was going to expire in 30 days anyway. But it was almost impossible to find unless a distributor gave you the URL to it. They also have a Flash Programming Utility that is separate that works well for programming the MCU's. Now if they would have a forum site like www.avrfreaks.net has the chips might take off pretty well. Except for what shows up surplus, they still have no easy source for buying the chips except through a distributor.