erik malund wrote:

6) Cygnal and TI eval/devel boards.

9) 1 GHz eMac.

Do not work together. Whether you like it or not, the development tools available for the '51 are all windows based.

Oh, I know that -- although I was able to get sdcc to build on OS X, and it seems reasonable.

The real reason for having the Mac is because the OS X development environment is a lot easier to deal with than Windows'. I've been doing a lot of USB stuff, and if you do something bad, Windows will blue-screen, but OS X doesn't. I was able to cook up a little OS X HID control panel in no time.

Agreed: all of the micro (and FPGA) development tools are Windows-based. That's why I've got a PC and a Mac. I also have a spare PC that could be turned into a Linux box if necessary.

-a