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

[Nicolas Pomarède <npomarede@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Le 16/07/2013 14:21, Miro Kropáček a écrit :
> Hi guys,
>
> sorry for the poetic subject but basically, it's true :) It's been some
> time when I had realized that if I want to code something serious (like
> an "Amiga style" demo), there's no way I can do it in 100% assembler
> with Devpac+qdsp+dspdebug threesome, i.e. that I need to organize
> structures in C(++), make it possible to debug in gdb (ideally on host)
> etc...
[...]
> So this is my last appeal to you, please implement a debugger into
> Hatari, a real debugger with stepping, changing values (regs, memory),
> UI (mainly UI ;), automatic symbol names (it's not there yet but I plan
> to import them from .LOD files, it's super easy) ... it really takes
> only two weeks and it would help me a lot (because my debugger has
> several limitations of course, no interrupts for example) and I'm sure
> not only me.
>
> Sorry for such a long post but I just wanted to show you that something
> which might seems as a b***h work can be actually pretty simple to do.

Hello

your work is interesting, but I'm not sure anyone is denying that a new 
"modern" UI that fits better with today's OS would be better.

I'm a big fan of Steem debugger and it's flexibilty on the number of 
extra windows you can open with different contexts, breakpoints and more 
generally all the things you can do from its UI.

Now, back to Hatari, the people developping it just lack time and/or 
interest to work on UI parts.

In my case, I'm mainly interested in accuracy and low level hardware 
emulation, that is reaching a point where the emulator could really 
match the real machine at the bus level for example ; honestly, coding 
UI is really on the bottom of my todo list, not that I deny it's not 
required to improve it, but that's not what I plan to do as "fun" on the 
spare time I can devote to Hatari.

At the moment, I don't think I can spend more than 2 hours per week on 
Hatari, so assuming the UI you wrote took 2 weeks, I guess it would have 
required me 3 months or more of spare time to do this "2 weeks/man" work.
And starting a new UI from scratch is not something you can do by 
assuming it will take 6 months from now before reaching a result, due to 
lack of spare time. It's really not motivating.

But there're other options : we already have some gui-sdl and gui-osx 
directories, so next logical step would be to have a gui-qt directory 
for example. As already discussed in the past, this would require some 
rework in Hatari (add an abstraction level for different UI, linking 
Hatari C code with QT C++, ...), but nothing that can't be done.

Given the work you made to build your UI and the fact that you seem to 
be interested by improving the UI for demos' developpers, maybe you 
could be the man to work on this part in Hatari ?
Emulation's knowledge is not necessarily required, it's more about 
handling windows and mapping some data structures in a more user 
friendly layout.


Regards

Nicolas