MBASIC is iffy...
I bought MicroBASIC Pro in October of 2003 for $230 with the promise of a major upgrade to be issued in the next 2 to 3 months. Ain't happened yet, and it's been well over two years. They have provided no support for any of the 'must have' 16F PICs, like the 16F88, -818, -819, and absolutely NO support for the 18F series, or dsPICs or any other of the latest and greatest. The processor menu lists several 18F PICs after you select "16 bit FLASH". But when you go to set configuration settings there is nothing there. And after you close configuration settings, the menu pops back to some 16F chip selected earlier. They may have intended to do something in 2003, but it never happened. So many people whined about this they stopped monitoring their own web site and left it up to a handfull of dedicated members to answer questions from beginners and each other. Last year they announce they were rewriting the code over to 32 bits for Win2K and XP. They then released a CD with a member's book about MB Pro. This didn't work with Win9x anything. They later claimed it was supposed to work with the 16F876 and -877, but the -877 wasn't supported. And several of the original PICs it supported have been obsoleted, and others have been upgraded to 'A' versions, which aren't supported, and don't work properly with the compiler. And it's still $230!
But despite all that, I recommend you get one of these if you can find it on Ebay for considerably less. For all its lagging behind, it still supports a number of usable PICs, and does it well. The math package, peripherals support and builtin debugger are almost worth the money in themselves. And they have come on the forum recently to announce a major push to finish the upgrade. Numerous present users (myself included) have cheerfully offered to pay for the upgrade if it convinces them to finish and put in 18F support.
As for CH BASIC, I like it a lot. I got version 3 in late 2003. I appreciate having all the available features appear in selection boxes in the left menus. But they too have done no real work in version 4 to justify the money.
Well, those are the two I bought for PICs so far. I just downloaded both demo versions of Oshonsoft's PIC BASICs, which look VERY promising! We'll see...
Later!
kenjj