Hi Volkan,

Emulators are mostly very expensive. So tons of examples and tutorials always included, if you buy one.

After Craigs posting it seems, emulators are a must, but this is untrue !
Emulators have also lot of disadvantages and even unusable in some cases.
Many earlier postings on this forum tells a lot of trouble with emulators.
E.g. its not to underestimate, that the emulator software was huge in
functionality and size. So about a half year of practice can be needed, until you can work easily with it.

Also an emulator can easy be harmed and so additional costs and time needed to repair it.
E.g. a poor grounding of the PC and your test board or an electrostatic charged chair can easy cause such damage.
In your application you can protect any connection from the micro to outside with supressor diodes and so on. But an emulator cause a direct connection from outside into the heart of your pcb. So not only the emulator, also other circuits on your development pcb can be damaged.


Also its untrue, that an emulator was "perfect". Especially on noisy environment it can goes crazy. Also emulation of power on behaviour and power saving modes was unable with emulators.
And if you connect memory mapped peripherals, so that the bus timing was important, the emulator differ from the real target also.
Only the real chip was "perfect".


So some developers prefer to live without emulators. And it was never known, that these guys needing significant more or less time to finish a project.

To make developing also easy in this case, it was needed, that you can easy insert debug routines into your application and reprogram your micro often and fast. In former times a SRAM was needed to download the program. Unfortunately this was eaten many port pins and the power on behavior was also not testable.

But today many micros with in circuit programmable Flash available, which can be downloaded over the serial or parallel port from your PC without any additional hardware.
Such programming / debug connection can also easy be protected against any harm, since only 2 or 4 lines to outside. In case of using the UART, the standard MAX232 driver circuit include already such protection.


Peter