Thank you for your replies.

I looked over many of the previous posts by searching this site and realized that my problem was most likely due to trying to use DEBUGIN for input. None of the code examples I saw utilized DEBUGIN. Finally I scrapped the 16F84 as processor, cut 4 data lines from my hardware interface and used a 16F628 with a USART. Using HSERIN (on RB1) as my input and LCDOUT with the 4 line mode, I had success last night.

It looks like the SERIN command was used in one of the examples. Perhaps I will work with it and see what happens.

I think a faulty crystal also complicated my debug process.

In this exercise I learned what a huge amount of information is available on this forum but it helps to search on the correct terminology. Once I discovered that what I am trying to do is referred to as a "backpack", I had a lot of good material to look over.