I've bloody well cracked the sonofabitch!

For the two of you who are still watching my baptism by fire into the
terrifying world of PIC programming under NT4, I've just gotta tell you how
I fixed it.  ("It" being the refusal of my linker to recognise the existence
of the .O file just churned out by the compiler - see previous hysterical
emails).

Actually, "fixed" is the wrong word.  Bodged is more like it.

I discovered that the problem only happened when I was linking in some of
the standard .O files in the MCC\LIB directory.  For some reason the linker
won't find them under NT4 (even when they are in the path) so you have to
set the "Library Path" in the Edit Project window to point to them.  This
dutifully gets sent to the linker as a " /l " parameter on the command line.
The problem is, it seems as if doing this actually *stops* the linker seeing
the .O file in the project directory (i.e. the one the compiler has just
produced).

In other words, as far as I can tell (and I may have the precise details
wrong), the linker will work on the .O files in the /LIB directory, or those
in the project directory, but not both at the same time!

I'm almost certain this will be some subtle problem with NT's support for
16-bit applications.  Or could it be an MPLAB 4.12 bug that no-one else has
noticed?

The solution is remarkably simple.  Make sure *every* file the linker needs
is in the project directory.  All I had to do was copy those four .O files
from the \LIB folder into the project folder.  (Of course I removed all the
project nodes and added them again, pointing this time to the ones I'd just
copied into the project directory).

Now it builds perfectly, and I'm a happy chappy.  In fact, delirious is more
like it.

Hah!!  Only joking.  As well as wrestling with C17 I'm also giving Hi-Tech C
a fair crack of the whip.  I just can't get on with it's IDE, so I'm using
it from within MPLAB.

I'll tell you something funny.  It compiles 'C' files just fine.  But I also
want it to assemble a '.AS' file.  A reasonable requirement, yes?  This
particular .AS file gets thrown out by the compiler, which reports (amongst
other things) a syntax error on line 10.  The problem is, line 10 is a
comment (with a genuine ';' at the beginning).  In fact the first 18 lines
are all comments; the first line of real code being on line 19.

You can probably see why I have niggling doubts about the quality of the
development software you guys have to wrestle with!  I'm mostly used to
Delphi, which is programmer's heaven compared to this.... ;-)

Lest anyone misunderstands, the above paragraph was written with tongue
firmly in cheek.  Seriously, I don't mean to criticise the guys who produced
C17 or Hi-Tech's PIC C.  It's a miracle to get a 'C' compiler at all for a
little thing like the PIC and they've done an astonishingly clever job.  But
I've gotta say that the learning curve seems hellish steep!

Many thanks to everyone who has helped me.

Steve

Steve Thackery
Suffolk, England.
Web Site: http://www.btinternet.com/~stevethack/