Very rarely will you write a program of any complexity correctly
on your first try. This isn't much of a problem if you have a way to
quickly compile and test your program on the computer, without
going through the steps of connecting your hardware, starting up your
programmer software and uploading into your PIC's flash.
MPLAB, the free IDE from Microchip, provides this testing capability
in a (nearly) fully functional PIC simulator. This is also a great tool
for learning assembly programming even if you don't have - or can't
yet afford - hardware.
This tutorial will demonstrate the use of several aspects of the simulator.
It follows from the "Getting
a barebones template to compile" tutorial, and assumes
you have already gotten that program to compile correctly. If you haven't
gone through that tutorial, but know how to set up a project, go ahead
and download this assembly file (BlnkDem.asm),
and get to the point where you can compile it.
[in progress]
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