Hi all
A very kind soul made my day!!!!
He <B>GAVE</B> me a serial in circuit programmer. <B>FREE</B>.
Has a serial connecter and the output is a 6 wire telephone plug which takes the signal to any one of a number (3 at the moment) of small boards, an 8 pin, a 14/16/18 pin and a 40 pin unit. All I have to do is populate the boards with an ic holder and a bunch of header pins and make up cables appropriate to each.
The 40 pin unit is actually a full on project board, own voltage regulator, crystal, reset button, power led and <B>ALL</B> the ports are taken to header pins via a current limiting resistors. Theres even place for screw type connectors if needed. Very neat even if I say so myself!

All I have to do now is re-create the boards on Eagle so that I can make up some more as and when I need them.

Talking about Eagle takes me to my "electronics" computer. I've loaded so many gui's, compilers and all sorts of other things lately looking for a comination that will work for me, I think I've given the thing a nervous breakdown. So, guess who will be nuking a hard drive and getting a fresh Win2KPro installation done Friday nite.

It goes without saying that PICBasic Pro will be in there somewhere, the question is "What Else Is Needed?"

<B><U>MicroCode Studio : Cost 150 UK Pounds (ZAR 2250 approx) </U></B> Cant get the "Case" statement to work properly. If there is a bug in the demo, who's to say its not present in the (costly) purchased installation.

<B><U> MPLAB : Cost FREE </U></B> Seeing as it is the one that Microchip themselves have put out and is free, this seems like the most promising option. The PICBasicPro site also has what seems like a pretty good instruction sheet on how to get PBP integrated into MPLAB. There also seems to be a whole bunch of training/tutorial stuff (hav'nt checked it out yet!)

<B><U>I C Prog : Cost FREE </U></B> Seems to be aimed at the people who are into very low level programing. Way beyond where I am at the moment - maybe in the future if I really become "geeky" about the whole thing.

So! Once I've done the box re-install, download the latest stable MPLAB and get it working with PBP. I have a PIC12 around somewhere so we'll try flashing a LED. I think that would be the "Hello World" type program to start with.

To all the people who gave advice and comment, a big thanks. Really appreciated it.

All the best