Sunday, July 27, 2008

Debugging....

Its just occured to me that if I modularise this debugger then it could be even more useful than just talking to a debug stub on a remote machine. If I have a UDP connection (keeping it as simple as possible), then theres nothing to really stop emulators adding this simple functionality either. Now I've been fed up with emulator debuggers for ages, all ofthem are rubbish and even Minus4's has quite a few issues due to the way I'd initially implemented it. So imagine doing a simple API where you can either write your own comms connection, OR implement a simple Serial/UDP stub on a remote machine or emulator and suddenly everyone could use this as a front end debugger to their own projects.

Now, I susupect it will take some time to get that API correct so it works across so many differnt machines/platforms but in the end it should be kind-of like DevStudio. It can plug into any system and do full debugging on it. As long as the debugger has a CPU plugin (starting with 6502), it can get a query for various high level things like get dissassembly (which could also return a source level view I guess), Step/Trace, Run, Stop, Get/Set Registers, Get/Set Memory, Get/Set breakpoints and all the rest - then it should be possible to make it completely modular.

I'll have to give this some thought as I carry on writing the new version.....

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