Inchworm+ got a new brain today!

Just now (at 12:30AM) I was surfin bills website and I found where he said to use a 16F877A. I downloaded the HEX File and imported it. I programmed the 16F877A and it worked! I then put it through it's paces, programming a 18F1320 over and over, and erasing, and verifying, erasing again, programming it, verifying, build, make, build all, and doing whatever I could to see if it would fail. It never did once! I am going to keep my current 16F877 for looking back at the past, but keep the 16F877A in there. It seems to program faster.

good stuff. Im not so lucky with my olimex. Its not the pic thats in the wrong!

I can't imagine why a 877A would make any difference at all from an 877. They're almost identical. I could be wrong but I think any "increase in programming speed" is all in your head.

Here's the migration sheet for 877 to 877A

EDIT: Ah! There might be something to your alleged speed increase. I see it has new programming specs and now writes to Flash 4 words at a time instead of 1 word, though that's for user write, and not necessarily ICSP write.

EDIT2: Na. That makes no sense. You're not programming the 877A, or writing to it. Aside from that (and a couple added comparators) they're identical.

Back when we were building ICD2 clones it was said that the 877A was faster. I do not recall the technical reason.

The 16F877A downloads its OS faster, otherwise it's exactly the same.