89S52 Programmer

Ive been working with 8051's in school for the whole of this semester, and the programmers we used are made by a really crappy company here in the city, and nearly no info is available on them. Also, we arent allowed to take them from the lab, and Id like to start doing a bit of work at home, so that means I need a programmer.

Other than my Arduino, this is the only uC Ive used, so please go easy on me if this is a stupid question I have a PICkit2 and an Arduino Duemilanove (with an FT232 chip and the ICSP header broken out) at home; can I use either of these to program the 89S52? If not, whats the cheapest programmer to program them? It will need to be usb (probably based around an ft232 if I have to build my own, because I dont have a parallel or serial port on my computer) so if the circuit is a serial one I can just slap the ft232 on there.

Look at PonyProg. It doesn't support 89S52, but it does support 89S8252 and 89S53.

Do you know why it doesnt support it? Unfortunately it has to be that exact chip that I use, as that's all we're allowed.

Because the 89S52 is a MCS-51 compatible chip. For the love of sanity hopefully one of the last in the long line of the 8051.

Theyre using the 8051 to teach us assembly, why is it such a bad thing that its an 8051? And I take it from the lack of response that Im pretty much screwed for using what I have as a programmer?

Probably the reason it doesn't support it is the 89S52 has a 4-byte command word and the 89S53, 89S8252, etc. have a 3-byte programming word.

How much high level programming can you do? It's the same interface, 'just' different commands.

Well I know C but we're doing everything in ASM.

The cheapest programmer that I know of is a free one that uses basically nothing more than 5 wires (plus, of course, the crystal and caps). You will find the details at
Arnab Chakraborty's microcontroller programmer tutorial: page 1 of 9