Can't Upload Chips

[minekingmax]

Hello, I am really into computers and I am really excited to be building one using nand2tetris.  
However, i think I am already stuck in the first chapter.  I am trying to upload the chips onto the Hardware Simulator, and it works fine at first.  But when I use TextEdit (I am using a OS X) and try to upload the chip to the simulator, the Simulator says, "Loading Chip."  The thing is is that it never, EVER loads (I have tried waiting days for it to load.  It doesn't work.)  When I look at my Terminal, it says that the chip is an, "Unknown source" and some other stuff.  

If you could, please review my problem and help me try to fix it.  Thank you.

[cadet1620]

The most common cause of the Hardware Simulator hanging with "loading chip" status message is if you load an HDL file that references itself, directly or indirectly.  For example, if you have a Not chip in the PARTS: section of Not.hdl

// This hangs the Hardware Simulator
CHIP Not {
    IN  in;
    OUT out;
    PARTS:
    Not(in=in, out=out);
}

For Not.hdl you can only have Nand chips in the PARTS: section.  Also be sure to build your chips in the order they appear in the projects section of chapter 1.  See this post.

The other main cause of HardwareSimulator problems is if your editor is saving your HDL file in Unicode or UTF encoding instead of ASCII/ANSI encoding.  See this post.

--Mark

[minekingmax]

Okay, this definitely helped.
But I'm still a little confused on the programming of the chip.  It says the a "pin name" is expected.  I don't understand what this really means exactly, so help would be great.

[cadet1620]

Let's do this by email so that you don't need to post source code to the forum.

Send me the HDL that's giving you problems and I'll send you back help to get you going.

Also, if you haven't read it yet, check out the Hardware Construction Survival Kit.

--Mark