Re: [hatari-devel] OT: My dream about Hatari

For example, currently Hatari debugger & profiler can automatically
profile CPU & DSP activity for worst frame in a game *while* you play it,
and automatically quit Hatari when you die (so that some extra scripting
can then automatically post-process the profile data).

[...]

If you need callstacks for some specific function while
the program is running, enable profiling at the beginning
and setup following kind of breakpoint:

[...]

Eero, this is exactly what I'm talking about. Putting aside the scary syntax :) I totally recognize the power of current Hatari debugger/profiler, that's actually why I'm so sad that I can't use it. Your use cases are totally different from mine because right now, if I develop a new code, the typical situation is "whoops, I see black screen, I need to examine what's going on". And while Hatari can certainly help me with identifying the crash spot, the actual act of debugging is pain (for example: stepping through instructions, skipping some code parts, resetting PC to another address, changing A1 register to a value in X, changing some memory, checking the result again ... I'm not saying it's impossible to do in Hatari but it's so complicated and counter intuitive that you better start DSP Debug under emulation and do that there)..

But if showing the disassembly & memory & reg contents in pretty boxes and
supporting stepping are the main uses for such a thing, somebody writing it
as Qt code that gets called instead of the current DebugUI() function could
be a reasonable smallish (couple of weeks) amount of effort.

I don't care even if it's done in .NET and needs 200 MB of memory :)

Any volunteers?

I can help with that, but currently my time is limited mainly to answering
questions on how such functionality could be integrated to Hatari.

Well, that's the problem. As you don't need this, you are not very keen to spend your valuable time on it. And while I need it, I better want to spend my time on coding Atari stuff :)

--
MiKRO / Mystic Bytes
http://mikro.atari.org