On 10/22/06, John Temples <piclist2@xargs.com> wrote:

> And I've done 3.3V emulation with ICE 2000 myself.  So his statement
> is not correct.

Thanks for the information.

> I don't know why the Real ICE is being touted as the next big thing;
> it's just a souped-up ICD2.  It has all of the annoying limitations of
> the ICD2 like severely limited number of breakpoints and instruction
> skidding.  The new trace feature is a kludge that depends on a
> particluar compiler and requires MPLAB to modify and recompile your
> code.  And I don't know what happens if you forget to remove all of
> the trace/log macros inserted by MPLAB before you do a production
> build of your code.
>

Thanks for the insight.

I think they have to tout Real ICE because ICE2000/ICE4000 are
really kind of outdated in today's world. The processor modules
are really too expensive. So even ICE2000/ICE4000 are good to have,
many people would not buy them.

Most of the other popular  MCUs like ARM/AVR/MSP430 and newer
8051s like those from Silabs all support JTAG and the debuggers
are small and relatively cheap.

ICD2 is relatively cheap as well but it is really painful to use for
bigger Microchip MCUs like dsPIC33F/PIC24.

PICkit 2 is really cheap but it seems it has a long way to go
to even catch up with ICD2 in terms of PIC16F debugging.

I also believe that the firmware/software Real-ICE will be actively
developed to give it more functionality.
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