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Why asm sucks today.

Posted: Sat 23 May, 2009 10:42 am
by King Harold
And yesterday, that's when it started.
Anyway, I was debugging this stupid piece of code that would go berserk and fly into the C000 range at (seemingly) random. It was not ordinary code that flows in a relatively straight line, but the kind of code that jumps all over and pushes calculated addresses where it does a return on, excessively uses ports 6 and 7 etc. So I debugged all those stupid little tricks only to find out, after about 5 hours of debugging, that everything was caused by a stupid little "inc c" that I forgot to delete when copying and pasting code. Somehow it ended up affecting which ram page would be swapped in bank B.

And flaky debugging support is partly at fault here. How can I add breakpoints while already debugging? I don't always know ahead of time where I might need them

Re: Why asm sucks today.

Posted: Sat 23 May, 2009 8:27 pm
by kalan_vod
Are you using Spasm for assembling it, and wabbitemu to debug?

Re: Why asm sucks today.

Posted: Sat 23 May, 2009 8:33 pm
by King Harold
No, would that work better?
I'm using brass (the old one, 1.something) and PTI

Re: Why asm sucks today.

Posted: Sat 23 May, 2009 9:11 pm
by darkstone knight
if you think available debuggers suck, write your own :pirate:

Re: Why asm sucks today.

Posted: Sat 23 May, 2009 9:22 pm
by King Harold
Yea I've tried, but accurately emulating the hardware was hard enough to give up..
The core itself is not that hard though

Re: Why asm sucks today.

Posted: Sun 24 May, 2009 1:01 am
by Halifax
darkstone knight wrote:if you think available debuggers suck, write your own :pirate:
Or just improve WabbitEmu's already established debugger.

Re: Why asm sucks today.

Posted: Sun 24 May, 2009 2:39 am
by tr1p1ea
Yeah those little errors are annoying, its even worse when you have *forgotten* to put 1 little instruction in.

Re: Why asm sucks today.

Posted: Mon 25 May, 2009 11:03 am
by kv83
Spoiled brat. :P Back in the days we programmed in notepad and debugging was either using VTI or your own calc and pray for the best :rofl:

Re: Why asm sucks today.

Posted: Mon 25 May, 2009 12:03 pm
by King Harold
kv83 wrote:Spoiled brat.
Yea I guess I'm a little too used to visual studio.. conditional breakpoints ftw

Re: Why asm sucks today.

Posted: Tue 26 May, 2009 6:21 am
by tr1p1ea
I will admit that the Flash Debugger once helped me solve a problem that would have been more difficlut on other calc emulators since it has some decent debugging features. If only the emulation side of things was modelled on a real calculator ... (And not one that lets you get away with some pretty serious violations).

Re: Why asm sucks today.

Posted: Tue 26 May, 2009 1:27 pm
by benryves
My biggest problem with Flash Debugger is its dreadful handling of keyboard input, rendering it virtually useless for games (especially if you intend on holding multiple keys down).

Re: Why asm sucks today.

Posted: Wed 27 May, 2009 10:31 pm
by Dwedit
For me, the worst common mistake is the backwards LD instruction. Seems that it happens way too often.