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  • Joined: 07 Aug 2007
  • Posts: 220
  • Location: Yach, Germany
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Aiming for symbolic debugging
Post Posted: Sat Oct 02, 2021 7:20 am
Some Emulators have support for debugging at the assembler level, via an integrated disassembler (I''ve used that functionality in Meka oncce in a while).

However, many programmers write their programs in C, and being able to have symbolic debugging would help with program development. We can't have that on the hardware (the Sega 8-Bit hardware doesn't support it), but we could have it in emulators.

Being able to set breakpoints in C code, or quickly see the content of variables would be helpful.

I think it could be possible to create an interface for GDB, the GNU debugger, in an emulator. But I'm not an emulator author (apart from an experimental ColecoVision emulator that I wrote long ago, and that worked for some ColecoVision games only), so someone else would have to do that.


What I think I could do, however, is to make the z80 backend in SDCC emit ELF binaries with DWARF debug info, suitable for use with GDB.
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  • Joined: 29 Mar 2012
  • Posts: 879
  • Location: Spain
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Post Posted: Sat Oct 02, 2021 8:26 am
You can have that with SDCC and Emulicious, although it's not working well to me (but it's perfectly to other people).
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  • Joined: 14 Apr 2013
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Post Posted: Sat Oct 02, 2021 8:34 am
kusfo wrote
You can have that with SDCC and Emulicious, although it's not working well to me (but it's perfectly to other people).

Yup, it's available for a year already (wow, time is passing so fast).
https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=emulicious.emulicious-debugg...

@kusfo if you can send me your files, we can solve your issues :)
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  • Joined: 29 Mar 2012
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  • Location: Spain
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Post Posted: Sat Oct 02, 2021 8:41 am
@calindro: You can clone my repo here: https://gitlab.com/1985Alternativo/gotris

I think I pass you a zip one year ago and it's working for you....
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