16F84/16F628 and Manchester

[Ioannis]

I promise you that I've read pretty much every post on it

Seems not...

1. I've noticed some examples here make use of HSEROUT/HSERIN commands. I tried writing the code using these and the program (Microcode Studio with PBP) would not compile it. Subbing these commands for SEROUT/SERIN eliminated these problems. I'm assuming my chips do not support these commands. Am I correct?

Correct. Have you read the chips data sheets???

2. OK...old school thinking here. Since each Manchester data word is 16 bits long.... how do I send it out of the PIC that has a start, 8 data byta, stop , parity bits? Some examples here were using SEROUT2 as opposed to SEROUT command and I did some research on those in the Microcode Help file. Am I correct in assuming that SEROUT2 allows to transmit longer data and is not limited to just 8 bits?

No. You still send bytes but every data byte is encoded in two Manchester bytes.

3. I understand that one needs to send out a preamble allowing the receiver to stabilize before it accepts good data. Does the preamble need to be sent out before every data word, or just at the beginning of the entire data sequence?

Only at the start of the data sequence.

Ioannis