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

Hi!

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

I'm not sure if the 'dspinfo' thing was added to show DSP stack state? This is definitely useful.

LEDs to show HW activity can be handy, because if they remain ON when the program stops you have something like a clue to what was busy. The problem will be identifying which ones add value to a debugger.

A short queue/history for for DSP HOST port exchanges would be interesting (port data & status). That's pretty useful since loss of sync is a source of lock-ups. If one processor stops, it's interesting to see what pattern led to that. If the data, op (R/W), status were all side by side for each entry, you'd be able to see if data was written at some earlier point when the port was not ready, etc. (Note: flag state exists on both sides of the port and due to buffering, might not always agree)

A status flag showing when the blitter gets in activated in HOG mode vs non-HOG can help find blitter bugs in code which uses mixed modes in lots of places (like a game). A status query in the debugger for addresses which activated the blitter in each mode would be useful here.

Another useful thing for blitter problems - having the debugger notice/alert when the blitter HW registers (other than busy bit) are modified while the blitter is running. That's usually a disaster, and can be hard to find (Far better avoided in the first place with tidy code, but then why do you need a debugger? :).

Those suggestions are very hardware-centric, but then it is the Atari platform. I have some other ideas too but the ones above would more likely help solve bugs.