At 20:54 03/26/99 -0600, Eduardo R. wrote:
>  I would like to receive feedback from you guys with experience on this
>subject. I am seriously considering to buy an emulator, and it looks from
>what I have heard here that Mathias and Icepic are well acepted.
> Is the first time I am going to deal with them an I have the feeling that
>some are really complex to get familiar with.

i don't think either of them is what one might call a "complex" emulator;
at least the mathias is a rather basic emulator. you can check out the
functionality of the mathias with their software, running in a "virtual
mathias" mode, which basically simulates the emulator.

most of the features work as claimed, some minor ones don't work as
expected/claimed, the primary functionality (running the program as if it
were a real chip) seems to be working ok, and support seems to be good (as
far as i can tell from my short experience).

what does not work as expected/claimed: basically source code integration
with the hitech c compiler, which seems to have some serious
incompatibilities in the interpretation of the cod file format. (they say
it's better since the last hitech update, but i haven't checked on that
yet. and both said before that their cod file interpretation was ok...)

the trace buffer is very basic in its function -- it really just traces
everything, no selection criteria, for example. and it loads everything
down to the host at every break, which can take annoyingly long tens of
seconds if you have a large trace depth set up. they could download only
the chunks i'm looking at, for example.

ge