Andy:

You said it well!!!

My take on it is that Mr Erlacher is stuck in a 1986 time warp on planet Earth some time before Cap'n Kirk and Spock came to straighten things out with a proper JTAG cable. Up till that time it was all DB25's and ADM3A's wrapped up in an endless swirl of cosmic Intel dust.

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There was of course a time before the time warp started that idea of using an embedded debug monitor earned quite high merits as a good way to support embedded code development. ICE boxes of the day were incredibly expensive and also incredibly unreliable. As a matter of fact in the 1984 time frame I adapted a hacked up binary of IBM Debug 1.1 to run from ROM on an embedded office product I had designed based on a 80186 chip. A couple of years later I did nearly the same thing with DEBUG 2.1 and had it self booting off a floppy disk straight into an embedded synthesizer machine based on an 80286 chip was being done for a company from Japan.

Today I use JTAG microcontrollers. Why ?....they work and the utility offered is as good or better than many ICE boxes and your entry cost is a $100 or so. Look at SiLabs parts for example. Here are links to some more comments about using the SiLabs (formerly Cygnal) JTAG scheme for embedded development.

http://www.8052.com/users/mkaras/Cygnal_ICD.phtml
http://www.8052.com/users/mkaras/CygnalEval.phtml

Michael Karas