Re: [hatari-devel] Most wanted debugger/profiler feature or convenience? (Blitter/LED)

[Douglas Little <doug694@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I'm not sure it's easy to choose what kind of blitter access should be considered as "bug" or not and traced as such in Hatari.
As with the pacemaker example, we see they alter some registers while blitter is on.

Of course - for emulation it's not helpful. But debugging code is a different scenario - it's not so much a case of deciding whether something is a bug or not - it's more a case of knowing when a class of thing is happening (in this case, a class of thing that is usually - but not always - accidental). 

 

IMO, using --trace blitter already allows to see when blitter start/stop, and if some registers are accessed in between.

TBH this is may be enough as it is. Having it actually breakpoint/react is only needed if that helps find where it happened - but logging the address along with the event achieves the same (one of the benefits of non-intrusive emulation).

 

If we want Hatari to report some possible coding bugs / bad practices, I think it would be better to keep traces in Hatari as they are and feed the output trace file to another program to do a higher level analysis (as you do with the python profiler tools for example).

I think it is helpful to expose nasty state problems a programmer could find difficult to inspect directly - and let them do the rest of the work yes. :)

D.