LS,

Seen the problems I've faced with controlling the PCF8574 (see http://www.8052.com/forum/read.phtml?id=89880) and seen the fact that I only have an eprom simulator without debugging facilities (which is fine, but in some situations inadequate), I'm thinking of buying an emulator or simulator.
Using this, I can debug my code by stepping through it, putting breakpoints, etc. Facilities that I don't have for the moment.

However, there's a huge amount of possibilities out there.

• I know Keil has the MCBx51 Evaluation Board.
  
• I also saw on Michael Karas' users page that he once bought the C8051F120DK Development Kit (currently Silicon Laboratries, formerly Cygnal) for a project.
  

I looked at the specs of the latter and for US$149 (about 120 Euro), I feel you have a lot for your money.

This tool has the following possibilities (maybe even more):

• Run, Halt, Single-Stepping and Animate
  
• Set Hardware Breakpoints
  
• Inspect/Modify Memory and Registers
  
• Download Program Memory
  
• JTAG interface
  
• 64 IO ports
  
• Connector which brings (almost) all signals outside
  
• ...
  

The price I want to pay for such device, is max. US$200 (also important to mention, I thought...).

Any suggestions/recommendations?

Best rgds,

--Geert

PS: typo's in this message are due to my cat. She's laying half on the keyboard right now... ;-)