How can I establish what RAM I need...and therefore which PIC.

[HankMcSpank]

Hi Hank,
Instead of using a bunch of spaces have you tried "lining up" you columns by sending the ASCII code for TAB, I think it's 9, that might save a couple of bytes here and there.

Good luck!
/Henrik.

Just to give some feedback here - a judiscious amount of abbreviating in my original unfeasibly long debug line, coupled with use of Henrik's tab idea above - ie of boshing in a load of ,9, entries throughout debug the line vs the spaces I was using (which is also superb for lining all the onscreen info up - much easier on the eye) has seen my program wordcount plummet - (from about 4080 to circa 2200) I'm chuffed to bits.

My Uart 'VT' is somewhat irritatinlgy outputting a line with corrupt characters every 7-10 lines - could this be because my program uses two interupts ....thereby garbling the serial data a little?