> A silly question: what the hell did we do when simlators and ICE were not
> the norm? I remember many a late night doing the program-test-erase cycle
> using EPROMS. Finally settled on live loaders that loaded the code directly
> into RAM. Some things a simulator simply cannot do the job and you need
> a live board. This seems to be one of them.

These days every PC has enough power to simulate microcontrollers, and
if the simulator is sufficiently flexible it should help in almost all
circumstances. The real problem is that most simulators are _not_
sufficiently flexible (e.g. almost all of them do not provide a
language to add simulation of external devices).

This said, there are at least a couple of PIC simulators in source
format (one, written here by two students, is available from my
home page) and it is likely that you can modify them to suit your
purposes (e.g. add simulation of external hw).

        Luigi
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Luigi Rizzo                     Dip. di Ingegneria dell'Informazione
email: luigi@iet.unipi.it       Universita' di Pisa
tel: +39-50-568533              via Diotisalvi 2, 56126 PISA (Italy)
fax: +39-50-568522              http://www.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/
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