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

What's your most wanted debugger/profiler feature or convenience?

I thought of one more thing that would interest me - being able to see the instruction head/tail cycle information either in the debugger or as part of the profile export (for 68020+).

This information can only be found in timing data sheets and is practically impossible to use because the information is never seen in context. Nobody can remember so many values. If they are shown next to the instructions in real code, there is suddenly a hope of re-scheduling for them. There might even be an easy way to indicate effective instruction 'overlaps' in the profiler (although 'by eye' would be a good start).

I did some experiments years ago with this and found some timing effects on 68030 from simply reordering instructions. The effects were mainly around memory read/write operations but they probably extend to normal instructions too and may have involved head/tail timings.

This sort of thing doesn't require perfect emulation to be useful - it's more of an auto-documentation thing affecting disassembly and probably of interest only when hand-optimizing small areas of code. It does depend on accurate cycle information entered from the datasheets but I expect it's already in there?

It's hardly an important feature, and the effects/opportunities may be small - but it would allow some experiments to be done which are not tempting otherwise.