I need to learn to program MSP430, but don't have the actual chip yet. All configurations that I've tried at Code Composer Studio (except Snapshot, but it does not count, right?) require something on my USB. How do I learn to program the chip without the chip?
And what is an emulator that requires a USB?
This emulator is pretty awesome, once you can get it running. Note that it does claim GDB support, which likely means you can get a pure eclipse CDT C project & CDT-GDB-HW-Debugging session up and running against it (making sure to compile with the msp430's tool chain, of course).
http://opencores.org/project,openmsp430
As far as a simulator, the answer is truly 'no'. I would like to be wrong on that... But consider for a moment the number of variants of the msp430, the peripherals, and so on. Not sure if any company can justify that kind of cost!
Especially when launchpad/etc are so cheap and fast.