On Mon, 13 Apr 1998, Stu wrote:

> Hello All,
>
> I am currently in the final stages of completing by final electronics degree p
roject. 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 electron
ic 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 se
t 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 think
ing 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 *ho
pefully* presents the PICs operation in a way that is more familiar to people wh
o 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 pro
gram 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 instr
uction set, 'equ' and 'end' and no WDT!), and Im sure its very buggy (its my fir
st C program & I've hardly done any testing yet - bug reports will be greatly ap
preciated!), 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

Hi Stuart,

You may wish to post this message to GNUPIC mailing list too. There are
probably a few people there interested in a DOS-based freeware simulator.

As you may or may not be aware, I'm also writing an open-sourced
simulator which you can find here:

http://www.interstice.com/~sdattalo/gnupic/gpsim.html

However, since I'm a luser (a self-denigrating, semi-pejorative
description of a linux user), you'll find that gpsim works only under
Linux. Bob Cousins has made a port to windows/dos with the help of CYGWIN
tools.

Also, gpsim is currently text-based - there is no gui. It's been designed
to be fast. In fact it out performs a 20Mhz pic (on my 450Mhz PII). The
downside is that it's somewhat difficult to use (even for me!). Over the
last couple of weeks I've been making steps to improve the user interface.

btw, the info for joining the gnupic mailing list can be found here:
http://reality.sgi.com/jamesb/gnupic/

Regards,
Scott