I just want to give a huge thanks to all who have helped by answering my MCS-51 related questions. I've just finished up writing, testing and debugging my first MCS-51 code for the Atmel AT89S8253 and it works beautifully.

The code I cooked up is for a MIDI switchable valve amplifier that is made by a well known company. In their original code, they didn't not implement MIDI control change to allow MIDI controllers which feature "instant access" buttons to be mapped to the front panel buttons on the amp, which kept the user from being able to switch things individually (they could only use program change to call up "patches" which switch multiple things at one time...basically "scene recall"). I now have a chip programmed to be functionally identical to theirs but with the added ability to send MIDI CC messages to switch functions individually on the amp.

I will have someone beta testing the chip on their amp at the end of the month in real world conditions to see if he can uncover any bugs I was not able to uncover here in house.

Coming from a PIC background I have to say I enjoy coding the MCS-51 family much better than I do the PIC. Not sure if I like the fact that everything that gets driven on an output pin must be buffered, which adds to the component count of the design, but I love the much more convenient pin out of the MCS-51 over the standard 40 pin PIC pin out. All in all it was a fun chip to program and I look forward to using them in future designs.

I have been visiting 8052.com for about 7-8 months now reading through all of the tutorials as well as studying the instruction set, and it was an awesome fall back reference when I needed to brush up on instructions during my code writing phase. This place is a plethora of useful information for the MCS-51 family and I've been recommending it to anyone who cares to learn the MCS-51 family of microcontrollers/processors.

Again thank you all for your help and you will be seeing me around here a bit more.