Imre,
Surely you can reverse engineer ?

Most likely the politics are these:

1) A third party develops all "Official" programming accessories,
including H/W and S/W
2) The third party recieves Microchips promotion, in return:
3) Microchip is allowed to publish as virtual freeware, all programming
S/W by same    third party, on web and CDROM.

I am not "in the know" on this topic, this does seem to me to be the
logical deduction however.

Following from the previous points: If Microchip "Give Away" the
communication protocols for the third party hardware, then how do you
think third party would feel ?

By the way, have you ever considered diss-assembling the publically
available PICSTART PLUS 17C4x  *.HEX upgrade file ?

regards,
Graham Daniel.

> On Thu, 21 May 1998 10:33:04 +0200
>
> Dr. Imre Bartfai did write :-
>
> > That's why (PIC again) I plan to develop a software driving the Microchip
> > PICSTART+ programmer from DOS. I think, DOS may be buggy, but it is open,
> > and - because of its limited size - it is manageable for a man.
> > At a moment, I suffer under the lack of time, and - on the other hand - I
> > hope to get some support from Microchip. They ought to recognize such
> > software I plan is a MUST. If you plan to support me:
> >
> > please send a letter to Microchip asking for a DOS-based programming
> > software using the PICSTART+. I appreciate your action and I think it
> > could motivate Microchip to deliver me the needed information. May be, I'm
> > naive. I hope I ain't.