You are right Andy, It's happened to me when I moved from PIC to AVR, and appeared that the move was

It's kinda compulsory to work with this chip in this project and because of me considered new to 8051. Neither I nor my friend are planning to ask him for the ISP. We are planning to ask him for more complicated stuff, this coder does not like too many requests because if he answers the first time, we cannot guarantee the next time, don't ask me what is the nature of this partnership because I don't know many details about it. Both of them seem to help each other on coding and ideas, and this is what they call partnership, I have no problems with this thing. The work is between me and my friend, and he is the one who would call that partner, I am new to the whole mixture. My friend is only interested in understanding how the codes work, he knows what I was asking about! But said, try to learn your self.. and find out what we can do if we can not get the ISP firmware from that guy.

Yes I have the *.dsn and *.max files and I looked at them today. My self I cannot force my friend to move to another manufacturer, or his partner too because all of their products are based on this chip. I talked about the idea of moving to another chip, and he said, not now, later on, we can do many products on this chip and for cheap, for you the development is a little bit difficult because you are new to 8051... You have to understand how we work and gain from our experience.

I think they have their tools, for me I prefer to stick with the original code and fully understand it, and when I become familiar with 8051 I will decide where to head. The SiLabs idea seems OK for me, at least for me. It seems they want me to start working with them the hard way :-))

Afterall ,is there a way to get the ISP firmware from an existing chip?