[stella] debugging w/ an emulator and other thoughts

Subject: [stella] debugging w/ an emulator and other thoughts
From: KirkIsrael@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: 16 Sep 2003 14:18:27 -0000
I was looking over http://www.videogamecritic.net/2600.htm , 
hundreds of atari reviews. I'm amazed at how many games I've 
never played or even heard of of, for that matter.  And now,
having been hacking at coding for a while, it's kinda fun to
play the "what elements are doing that" game...sometimes it's
easy, sometimes it's very hard. 

Anyway.

I was thinking about how much easier life would be with a good debugger...
one that could read in a DASM list file and show your variables by name.
(though given various tricks for RAM reuse and reference, I guess that 
might be trickier than it first seems.)

One thing Z26 could use is a button that says "just dump one frame's
worth of trace info".  It's kind of intimidating to get like megs and 
megs of raw material just for a few moment's of recording.  

I've tried to to use PCAE's debugger, but the interface is so difficult,
combined with having to get past not having any variable names, it didn't
help as much as I thought it would've. 

Ah well. I'm still able to make progress, but slowly.  It took me a few
hours last night to realize that I really need to stop trying to reinvent
how to do a simple comparison, and should just crib from where I already 
do that in the code...for some reason, between knowing what flags I have
to clear when and remembering which value is acting as if it was being 
subtracted from which, flag wise, it's non-trivial for this ASM n00b.

But at this point, I have a kernal that should fully support "Poorlords",
and now thanks to the Horizontal Positioning technique I got from 
Andrew Davie,  I'm detecting goals without the use of collisions w/ the 
playfield.  (hence the need for numerical comparison)

Cheers,
Kirk

-- 
KirkIsrael@xxxxxxxxxxxxx    http://kisrael.com
    Life's too short for sentences that begin "life's too short for..." 
          --Slashdot 


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