Oh, you don't want to limit yourself to the hundreds of available 18F series devices so your contemplating using old parallell I/F EEPROMs instead, needing so many I/O-lines that you'll probably have less PICs to choose from than if you went with an 18F series device in the first place. And of those devices that DO have enough pins 75% probably are 18F series anyway.

Also, a cheap 32k x 8 parallell EEPROM is like €14 while a cheap SPI FLASH with less than €1 (and has 4 times the amount of space).

You don't need assembly to use the MSSP module.