After leaving Windows, I thought I\u2019d need to keep a copy around as a VM for edge cases, like programming PICs. In fact I was resigned to not being able to continue PIC development.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Then I discovered the difficulty the Pico has with some of my older hardware and I decided to have another look at it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So I booted into a Windows 7 VM I kept for running Pic Basic Pro and I wasn\u2019t happy with the result. I already forget what the problem was, but part of it was that my installation no longer registers as activated. I also had problems with icprog.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So I decided to try a different approach.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Essentially, I figured out how to use Lutris to run DosBox so that I can compile the Pic Basic programs. I wouldn\u2019t have bothered, except that I needed to use a PIC to drive the motor controller on Spot X.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It was slow AF, but after increasing the clock speed of the emulator it went much quicker. So compiling the software was a bit of a chore but doable. Then came the programmer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I use an ancient serial programmer with ancient software so I needed to go through a bit of rigmarole to get things working.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It involved adding a key to the wine system.reg file, checking that the symlink between com1 and \/dev\/ttyS0 was correct and then checking that I was in the dialout group.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I was using WINE to launch icprog, so I went to the folder where icprog105D.exe is and checked that icprog.sys was in the same location
I opened icprog with Wine Windows Program Loader and after checking the connection settings I was able to program a PIC with a precompiled hex file.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It works! Just,<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I\u2019ve noticed that I get a lot of verify errors; more than I would normally expect. Or rather, I have way more successful uploads than I have any reason to expect, yeah, let\u2019s say that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n