Hi all,

I use a Mac for all of my computer jobs. For the Internet stuff, I use
Netscape, both for navigation and for e-mail management. I am not an
expert of HTML; all that I have noted is that e-mail messages written in
HTML are shown as plain text messages, followed by duplicates of the
same messages interleaved with HTML opcodes; no loss of informations;
just a waste of bandwidth.

 Reg Neale wrote:

 >Initially I tried to use my Mac for PIC programming. Eventually
> decided it just wasn't practical. Finally went over to the
>  dark side for PIC-related activities :-)  A couple of PICsters
>  have since come up with Mac-based development platforms, but
>  I haven't had enough experience with them to give a personal
>  opinion.

I'm using MacPIC since it was in its early stage of beta development.
Since some months it has been brought to a good stability, so the
non-beta 1.0 version has been issued.
As far as I can state, based on my experience, it is a nice
programmer/emulator; no chrashes, a good emulator, no errors on chip
writing and reading, apart of small bugs at early times, quickly fixed
by the developer, Kevin Coble. (I am no way affiliated with Kevin; I
have paied my regular shareware fee, and I enjoy no other advantage then
using a well-made system  ;-))

Recently, I also started to use MPLAB/MPASM, because I needed to program
a 16F877, which is still unsupported by MacPIC.
MPLAB runs just fine on Mac computers, using VirtualPC with Windows 98.
I had some doubts before, but I not only was able to revise the source
code and write the '877 succesfully, but even updated the firmware of
PicStart+, writing the needed 17C44.
MPLAB runs well in all of its functions (at least, the ones I used);
even chrashes (of MPLAB) are perfectly emulated. The only sad thing is
that the Mac has no printer port, so only the programmers using the
serial port can be driven, such as PicStart+. Note that in order to run
Windows 95/98 with VirtualPC you need to have a fast Mac, such as a G3
or so.
However, I prefer to use MacPIC whenever possible.

Cheers

Leonardo Perretti
leo.perretti@projectpp.it