ahh... those are great projects and worth checking out later but might not be what im after atm. right now my requirement is specifically for bootloader development, not production or cloning arduinos. i need to cut down this edit/compile cycle time. the flexability of avrdude is hard to beat considering the number of chips i deal with. and at 2 or 3 bucks shipped on ebay a usbasp makes diy alternatives just not worth it. i was glad to see massimo and gang overcome their issues and add that to the list of supported programmers in 1.02.
speed and size of the hex is not important. my bootloaders are only 256 bytes or so. what i really need is a way to get avrdude to skip over all those unused ff locations quickly and program upper flash. any help there would be greatly appreciated.