Watch Window.

I've gotten most of the watch window running now, and although its not finished it IS doing the client memory lookup as part of the expression. This involves giving the expression system access to the ICOMMS interface. This is fine as the monitor window owns both the expression and the comms classes.

The theory is you can have multiple monitor windows each with their own ICPU,IComms and IEvaluation objects. This means watches are attached to the CPU window and so can fetch memory from the client using a different comms interface (or the same). This should provide the most flexibility for the future as you should be able to debug multiple CPU machines like the SNES or megadrive which has a main CPU and a seprate sound CPU.

So, for now the expression evaluation will do proper evaluations, and allow you to access memory on the client via the attached comms module like so: [TEMP+4,w] This looks up the label TEMP, adds 4 then looks up the client memory and downloads a word (the ,w bit). This could then be used as a further value into a more progressive expression like this....
[SpriteData+[CurrentSprite,b]*2,w]. Obviously the more remote memory accesses you have the slower it'll go; BUT it will do it.

So, its looking good. I've decided to drop the memory count at the end for now as this means you can ALTER watch values via this window as well - which I wasn't planning. So all in all, its going well.

I plan to release full sources the the following modules-

The ISymbolFile module to load the SNASM symbol tables

The ICPU 6502 CPU module

The ICOMMS parallel port COMMS module

The 6502 STUB for parallel port version of the comms (C64 and Plus4)

The TCP/IP ICOMMS module

The TCP/IP C++ STUB for emulators

I will not be releasing source to the main Monitor program. I do hope to be doing a UDP version for the RR-NET, but that might not be in the first release. There will probably also be a Z80 ICPU module for using with my spectrum emulator which Russell is currently rewriting in C#. He's also really keen to write a remote stub for a real machine somehow, although we'll need an interface for that first. I do have a download cable for an amstrad, so he should be able to write a stub for that in the future as well.

I'm not currently sure what the first version will look like, or what features will be in but I think it'll be the basic monitor with breakpoints etc. Watch and memory window. If theres anything you think it shouldn't be released without, let me know - but remember most key systems are pluggable, so if theres a CPU thats not supported, you can write it yourself! I might add some tool modules so that the ICOMMS can do things like fetch sprite data etc. This would mean you could add a tool that views maps, sprites and all the rest at a later date.

Future additions will include a 65816 module for the superCPU, and probably a 65c02 module as well as a Hu7 module sometime there after. I know these will take time to appear, but feel free to add it yourself! In the far distant future, 68000 will appear as I want to play with the Amiga+ST again and this would be an ideal way....

Be warned though, part of the license agreement to this will state that any new modules WILL be included in the main application package although I've yet to decide if it will require the source code to be relased as well. So even if you dont send me your modules to get included, if I find them, they WILL be. I suspect this won't be an issue for anyone, but be warned. This is only for new ICPU, ICOMMS (and any stub that goes with it) and ISYMBOLTABLE modules, not for any program that uses them. if you have a problem with this, let me know now why that is.