Here is a cute little program which might help for serial comms and PIC
chip debugging. At

http://www.iversoft.com/piclist/code.html
http://www.iversoft.com/piclist/files

look for PIC_HEX1.zip.

PIC_HEX.exe reads an MPLINK file and displays the on-chip variable names
and their current value .  Variables can be sorted by address or by
name. A hex dump of each ram bank is also displayed.  The PIC must have
serial port code to transmit the contents of a requested data value.
(The trivial serial port code for a 16c74 is also listed below.)

I've been wanting to do  this for a while, but never got around to
digging up the serial routines for the PC.  Thanks to Tom Handley's post
(2/24/99), I didn't have any more excuses, so I just went ahead and
wrote the program. I built on those routines and some others I had
laying around to create this monitor...just returning the favor!

It was a fun program to write, but, of course, it could
probably be upgraded for more useful operation.  Any suggestions?
Data logging to disk ?  Modify on-chip data ? Hmmmmm....

I've only tested it on one map file, one pc, and one PIC, your mileage
may vary!

Enjoy,
Ralph

The simple serial code looks like this:
;
CommsRxSI:                   ; void CommsRxSI( void )
;                            ; {
        banksel FSR_temp     ;    // MONITOR Reporter! \\
        movfw   FSR          ;
        movwf   FSR_temp     ;       push( FSR );
;                            ;
        banksel RCREG        ;    // read Rx register
        movfw   RCREG        ;
;                            ;
        movwf   FSR          ;       wTemp = *RCREG;
        movfw   INDF         ;
;                            ;    // transmit contents of
        banksel TXREG        ;       TxREG = wTemp;
        movwf   TXREG        ;
;                            ;
        banksel FSR_temp     ;
        movfw   FSR_temp     ;  pop( FSR );
        movwf   FSR          ;
;                            ;
        ReturnInt            ;
;                            ;