Robert: Sorry for the long delay. Too much going on around Christmas.

I quite like ASM30. It took a bit of getting used to as a lot of things work differently from MPASM and there are more commands but now I'm into it I like it much better. The only problem with Assembly in general is that it takes ages to write anything.

The built in macro support is only suitable for very basic things though and I usually find problems passing labels created with .equ into a macro. These days I don't use ASM30 macros at all. Instead, I define functions in PHP that write out the ASM30 code. It allows for much more compile time logic and can do things that Assembly macros will probably never do such as pulling in values from a website and inserting them in the ASM code.

I bought an ICD3 to write the code onto the PICs as my old programmer only supported up to PIC18. These aren't cheap but I'm glad I went with the ICD3 though because it is also a debugger. I honestly don't know how I used to debug things without being able to read all SFRs and RAM directly from the chips. So far I haven't paid for any software. MPLAB comes on a disc with the ICD3. I believe you have to pay if you want to use a C compiler (which is the main reason I'm still writing ASM)