Download from http://www.hardcoders.org/stella-20050703.zip
Notes from Stephen:
1) Fullscreen OpenGL in Windows is still not working correctly, better
to avoid it altogether for now.
2) Tracking changes is only working in RAM, not the CpuWidget. I'll
get to that later.
Notes from me:
There are a lot of changes since the last alpha. I'm sure there are bugs,
and I'm sure I forgot to mention some stuff in this message. If something
seems wrong or nonsensical, please let me know so we can fix it.
This alpha contains Fred Quimby's frying code. I tried changing it
around, but nothing I came up with worked as well as the original,
so that's what we used. Press Backspace during emulation to fry.
The debugger RAM tab and prompt "ram" command now track changes to
RAM. For now, we don't detect when the same value gets written to
an address as was already there: this will need changes to the core,
and we'll proceed carefully there.. Meanwhile, you can step, trace,
frame advance, or run, and see the RAM locations turn red when they
change value.
The prompt also tracks CPU registers that have changed since the last
prompt was printed (they show up in inverse video). The CPU tab in the
GUI doesn't do this yet, but it will soon.
About the tracking: we save the RAM state before each step, trace, frame
advance, or run/exit. At each prompt (or in the RAM tab) we show the
changes since the last save-point. We *don't* save the old-RAM contents
in the state file, so you can save state, run the emulator for a while,
then load state and see what's different between the last emulated state
and the statefile.
Prompt error messages are now red (actually reddish, TIA color $34 or so).
Generally speaking, the prompt now supports color, so I'm asking for
suggestions about ways to use color to make information stand out. Nothing
should *require* color to be functional though: Some people might be using
B&W monitors, and some people are color-blind. I'm open to suggestions:
visual design is not my strong suit :)
The "tia" prompt command now gives you a lot more information, including
the values of write-only registers and internal TIA state (such as the
actual color-clock position of each player/missile/ball). Color registers
are displayed numerically along with a swatch of the actual color from the
current TIA palette. Things like NUSIZx are decoded somewhat into English
(e.g. "size=8 copy=3 spacing=8" for NUSIZ0 value 3). Audio frequencies
are displayed as AUDFx values plus freqency in Hz. This command still
isn't finished (for one thing, it doesn't display strobes. Ideally I'd
like RESP0, WSYNC, etc. to show how many clocks it's been since they
were last strobed).
Added "riot" command. Shows raw and decoded I/O and timer state, including
English joystick directions (for now it always says "(no direction)"
because entering the debugger resets all the inputs. This will change).
Even though the joystick buttons are wired to the TIA, I went ahead and
included them here.
There's a "colortest" command that lets you see any TIA palette
color. This will eventually (after 2.0 release) evolve into a screen
layout tool of some kind (which may end up a separate program if it
gets complex).
I can't remember whether this was in Alpha 2 or not: prompt has
"savestate", "loadstate" commands. These work exactly like the F9 and F11
keys do during emulation, except you specify the save-slot in the command:
"savestate 0" through "savestate 9". This provides simple "waypoint"
support for the debugger.
Added "rom" command for patching ROM. I made it a separate command
from "ram" because you don't want to accidentally change ROM due to
a typo. There are one or two cartridge types that don't support ROM
patching because I couldn't figure out the addressing scheme (these will
be fixed in the future).
Added "bank" command. With no parameters, it tells you the current
cartridge type and number of banks. With a bank number, it switches
to that bank. If you want to patch ROM, you need to switch to the bank
you want to patch before using "rom". There are a couple of cart types
where I couldn't easily tell what to do, so they don't (yet) support
bankswitching from the debugger.
This isn't a new feature, but it isn't immediately obvious from the
help output: The "ram" command can change any non-ROM address, not
just the RIOT RAM. So you can say "ram CXCLR 0" to clear collisions,
or "ram TIM64T 30" to set the TIM64 timer. You can even switch banks
in a bankswitched cart with the "ram" command. I will probably split
this off from "ram" and make it a separate command (which is better,
"poke" or "write"? Or I could make them both work...)
Enjoy,
--
B.
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