Intermission....

Albatross!! Albatross!!! Get yar Albatross here!


okay... Got slightly side tracked as a beta of Call of Duty 5 came out today so I had to have a blast at it... FAB game, got to be one of my fav all time games the COD series. Anyway... Aside from that I'm trying to update Minus4j for Plus4world so they can get more games on line, and so its well....better.

It does have some issues and I thought I'd port back some Minus4w stuff. This should be easy as the source for Minus4w originally came from Minus4j. So it was all going swimingly well, then BANG! It all fell apart. I have the drawing code ported back and as far as I can tell its now identical, except Minus4w works, and Minus4j jumps up and down like a rabbit on a pogo stick. So now I find myself in need of an applet debugger. Im sure it'll be obvious once I debug it, but until I do... I'm a bit stuck. Fek. I could undo it all and then just fix one issue at a time, but that seems silly as Minus4w is much bette over all.

*sigh*

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.....