>>
        Sure glad that wasn't a PicMaster Emulator!  Gets kinda
expensive!  In general, all my PIC stuff has only +5V on the board, so
damage possiblity is limited.  Recently I had a 16c74a driving a serial
DAC driving a 4051 demux, driving a 324 op amp.  Accidentally shorted the
+15V on the 324 to an input, blowing the 4051 and the DAC.  Luckily it
did not get back to the PicMaster!
<<

In all fairness to makers of emulators, how often is an emulator
useful for anything other than the code download ability (which
exists semi-natively in the 16C84/16F84 as well as many of Atmel's
parts)?  I have used emulators myself, and have on some occasions
made use of the live debugging facilities they offered, but often
I find the extra bulk of the emulator (having to balance everything
on the desk, etc.) to be a major nuisance.

I think the philosophy in the micro industry is that anyone who's
anyone will spend $10K-$20K on emulation equipment for any micro
they're going to use, and at the very bottom of the scale that
philosophy sorta makes sense (some 4-bit micros don't exist AT ALL
in anything other than mask-ROM versions).  In the PIC range, though,
I think in-circuit-erasable-programmable micros are in many cases as
useful as emulators, if not moreso (no giant ribbons hanging around);
I'm pained by the fact that we **STILL** don't have anything bigger
than the 16x84 in such a configuration...

[soap box mode off]