On Sat, 30 Dec 1995, Brad Mitchell wrote:

>         Yes, but MPASM has LCALL too!, it's just not in Parallaxes
> Documentation of Microchip's assembler, but it is there.
> I switched over the the MPASM , and it's good and bad..
> I like the assembler, don't like the simulator as much, but am
> slowly getting used to it..


I like MPASM because it is made by Microchip (who should know their
products best), it supports the mneumonics used in the Applications Notes
(which I borrow greatly from), and it doesn't have macros etc to hide the
way things are actualy working which is very good for student such as
myself learning his first microcontroller.

But the simulator could use some work. It would be very nice if the
variables used in the program were automatically recognized and displayed.
Writing .ini files is for the birds. The way in which they are displayed
could use some work too. It's a big mess. Limiting the variable display
area to 10 lines (or whatever it is) is very inconvenient. What if I want
to see the contents of all registers? Sure, I can remove some and add some
others, but it's a pain. And why does it make the state of inputs 1 for
simulation purposes? Sure, that's what you put in w and call tris,
but...The parallax assembler puts an x there, I believe. The two letter
commands are rather obscure and hard to use as well. I've played with the
Parallax simulator a bit and it seems much nicer.

One question: Is there any command I can put in the code to tell the
programmer to turn the watchdog timer off? I always wonder why my chip
keeps resetting only to find that I forgot to turn the watchdog timer off
when I programmed it. I do use the watchdog timer in the end product but
until I can chase down all of the loops which may require a clrwdt
instruction, it sure would be nice to have it automatically turned off.

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tracy Reed          http://rohan.sdsu.edu/home/treed         IRC-Maelcum
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