My "Library" for ST7920 Graphical displays, works fine, but...

[HenrikOlsson]

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 is less than €1 (and has 4 times the amount of space).

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

[CuriousOne]

The main difference between us is the sourcing capabilities
I'm buying everything from china, so I'm paying about 3 cents for 24C256 and parallel eeprom is somewhere around 40 cents. I guess, I can tolerate the difference But for PICs, 2nd hand 16F886 is about 70 cents, and 2nd hand 18F4550 is about $4, that is already a difference
and regarding the pin count, what you're trying to say, that 40 pin or 64 pin PICs aren't available in 16F series? For sure they are.
So if you have simple, clean to understand code for working with MSSP in PBP, I'd like to have a look...

[tumbleweed]

If you're trying to write something totally generic that can be used with all the 8-bit PIC's then the most generic solution is to use the bit-banged I2C routines.

If you want a faster method then using the MSSP hardware is the solution, but-
a) not all PIC's have an MSSP module
b) even if they do, they all don't work quite the same, so there may be some slight differences in programming

SPI is simpler and faster than I2C but will take 4 pins instead of 2.
Either way, you will be limited as to which pins can be used... bit-banged can use pretty much any pins but the MSSP uses fixed pins.

If somebody required me to use a parallel EEPROM for something like this I'd laugh and say "no thanks".

[CuriousOne]

Well I tried software SPI with MAX7219 and was not impressed at all - updating 32x8 pixels led display was quite slow....

[HenrikOlsson]

So if you have simple, clean to understand code for working with MSSP in PBP, I'd like to have a look...

I'll just point to MELABS: https://melabs.com/samples/PBP-mixed/spimast.htm That example is what I used as a basis when I first used the MSSP module for SPI (for interfacing the W5100 (search the forum for that code if you want)). See, not a single line of assembly.

[CuriousOne]

Thanks, but that code is missing SSPBUF declaration?

[HenrikOlsson]

No.
SSPBUF is the Synchronous Serial Port Receive Buffer/Transmit Register. It's the name of register to/from which you write/read whatever gets shifted out.