A software simulator hosted in a Web page is described, and the evaluation of its effectiveness by students of the National University of Science and Technology in Zimbabwe is discussed. The processor which is simulated is the PIC16F84 picocontroller, and the screen display shows the source program, RAM locations and Special Function Registers. To minimise the size of the package, the functionality has been reduced so that it only displays a set of sample programs representing a number of key techniques in the programming of the device. Users can step through programs observing the memory changes to facilitate an understanding of the operations.
