Hello All,
 
I am currently in the final stages of completing by final electronics degree project. For this I have produced a simple PIC 16C54 simulator for DOS using C. I chose to do this as last year I worked on a project designing a simple electronic child's toy, and to do this I decided to try and use a PIC.
 
I had done a little assembly programming before and I found the instruction set of the PIC pretty easy to pick up, however when trying to test my program out I found Microchips MPSIM very difficult and unfriendly to use. This got me thinking that it if I had trouble with this and I had a little programming experience then electronics engineers who could benefit using PICs in their designs would probably find it even more difficult.
 
Therefore for my project I have produced a simulator / training tool which *hopefully* presents the PICs operation in a way that is more familiar to people who have only previously worked with electronics.
 
It would be very useful for me now to have some feedback from people who have gone through the process of learning to use PICs on whether they feel that a program like this could have been of help when they first started. In particular if they came from a pure electronics background rather than IT.
 
The functionality of the program is pretty limited (it only supports the instruction set, 'equ' and 'end' and no WDT!), and Im sure its very buggy (its my first C program & I've hardly done any testing yet - bug reports will be greatly appreciated!), however Im mainly interested in what people think of the concept.
 
If anyone out there feels that they could spend a few minutes looking at this and dropping me a quick e-mail with their comments please let me know and I will mail you the executable (around a 60 kb zip).
 
Many thanks in advance and best regards
 
Stuart