Originally posted by mister_e
absolutely not!

In your case it still seems to be a kind of baudrate problem... But only to be sure...
  • 1. Is your MCLR pin (pin 4) is tie to VCC ?
    2. Do you place capacitors (around 15pf) if using crystal?
    3. is a simple LED blink program on this PORTB.1 pin is working ?
    4. Is your supply line = 5Volt and clean ?
    5. What about if you add this line : DEFINE CHAR_PACING 1000
    6. what about if you try higher baudrate ?
    7. Is LCD ground is attach to the PIC ground?

1. pin 4 is tied to VCC
2. I'm using (22 pf) capacitors to the crystal
3. a simple LED blink program works great on PORTB.1
4. The supply line is a clean 5Volts
5. the DEFINE CHAR_PACING 1000 was added, it slowed the print a little on the display, but the characters are still not correct.
6. I tried a higher baudrate, same results.
7. the LCD ground is attached to the PIC ground

I read an article that said, sometimes when using a WINDOWS OPERATING SYSTEM it can cause havoc in the timing when communicating using the BIT BANG method. I'm not sure if this is the case with me or not. Is there some additional hardware I can add to my circuit, to by pass this BIT BANG method? Thanks for all your help.