Round ROUND-about way of coming to this HaD article/video of years before from @Mike Szczys himself: http://hackaday.com/2012/09/27/beginners-look-at-on-chip-debugging/#comment-2628854

Having some difficulty with my ancient version of openOCD, so looking through the release-logs of the newer versions led me to that link. Go Mike!

---------

Otherwise... it's connecting, I managed to manually twiddle one byte in the FLASH from "blank" to "nop" and can single-step to verify it works as expected.

So... I found another resource which suggests it should be as simple as typing "program <file.hex>" (as of 0.60). So I'll be compiling 0.90 soon...

Though, I don't yet have a hex-file to program... that'll be the next hurdle, I suppose. Have the mips-cross-compiliing/debugging toolchain from when I worked with the old cable box... but there's a bit more to that, as I understand... need some linker-scripts and some chip header-files...

I'm keeping a pretty wordy log of my progress/results/links, but it's FAR too wordy and round-about for public-consumption... I'll eventually strip it down to the bare-minimum "build instructions"(?) to get it going.

And This Guy: OpenOCD PIC32 Programmer · kinsamanka/PICnc-V2 Wiki actually uses a RaspPi as his JTAGger, but besides that, his script and stuff is quite informative and should turn out to be quite handy...