Freddie, Perhaps you should look at a Jackrabbit. It has plenty of features and can crunch numbers pretty well. At least that is what the ads say. If I remember right something like 20mflops and 1megabyte of code/data space. 5 8bit ports and 4 uarts. Check www.rabbitsemiconductor.com

Development kits are available from Digi-Key. These kits include a C compiler and asembler and are inexpensive.