Trouble recognising atmega8, fuse setting issue

Don’t worry this happens to the best of us, even with lots of experience. I normally hook a signal generator (outputting a 0-5V square wave) and feed this into CLOCKIN through a 1K resistor to bring the chip back up until I can reset the fuses.

FYI the internal OSC is pretty good if you only need timing within around 5-10% (depends a lot on temperature range). I’ve found it is quite stable and unless you are doing precision timing it is good enough for most things, including serial comms up to around 19200 baud. On breadboard your external crystal is likely to cause you more trouble than good, especially if you don’t have a scope to be able to quickly check it isn’t the source of a mysterious bug you’ve wasted a day trying to figure out…