John,
        Just a word of encouragement; I have recently finished a project
where 1 PIC14000 was a master and 4 PIC14000 were the slaves, and it works
and is now being released to production, so I know it can be done.  I used
PORTC<7:6>, and did it all in assembly.  I found a few strange things dur-
ing debug.  I run my slaves in interrupt mode, and at the end of each
write sequence, I got an interrupt indicating that a read operation was
required, which was a bogus event.  To fix that, I made a state machine to
detect a read interrupt immediately after the end of a write operation, to
dump the reading, and all my problems went away.

        But another warning:  while in design verification, the PIC's power
was varied, and we found that the ADC reading, particularly the calculated
temperature value, was way off (particularily as the voltage went below 4
volts).  After a day of testing, we found very strangely that if we used
the SREFHI signal as the bandgap reading, and used the bandgap reading for
SREFHI, the problem almost completely went away.  (I use all of Port A for
analog inputs.)  I contacted Microchip about this, and they couldn't immed-
iately reproduce it, so they want me to prove this problem to them; my boss
says that after the project is complete, we will revisit this and try to
make a simple proof of the problem.  But you may want to check this out for
your project.

Dave Reinagel
Auspex Systems, Inc.