Some beginner questions about debug

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tryphon
Very interested
Posts: 316
Joined: Sat Aug 17, 2013 9:38 pm
Location: France

Some beginner questions about debug

Post by tryphon » Sat Aug 17, 2013 9:53 pm

Hello,

I've just discovered this marvellous tool, and possibilities seem endless for romhacking.

It runs very slow on my hardware (5 - 10 fps) but I don't care, since I want to use it primarly for studying games' source codes.

Though, many advanced and exciting features, such as Active Dissassembly, are quite obscure. Tutorials with simple examples would be greatly desirable.


I'm stuck too with simple things :

- I traced (debug / Megadrive / Main 68000 / trace) some code to locate routines, it worls well, but I'm unable to save the trace log in a file.

- I made a RAM dump but the 'Save to' contextual menu reports an error whenever I try to use it; I copy/pasted the dump to an hex editor but it only worked once (I tried this too with the trace log, unsuccessfully).


Thanks for any help

Nemesis
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Joined: Wed Nov 07, 2007 1:09 am
Location: Sydney, Australia

Post by Nemesis » Mon Aug 19, 2013 3:06 am

Yes, there needs to be a lot more in terms of documentation. I'm hoping to be able to do that over time. As it is, I've barely had time to get online in the last few months, let alone do any real development.

You're running into a bug in the initial release. There was an error with the "save to" options in a variety of locations. I think they displayed an open file dialog instead. I've fixed this error in the source, but I haven't done another release yet I'm afraid.

tryphon
Very interested
Posts: 316
Joined: Sat Aug 17, 2013 9:38 pm
Location: France

Post by tryphon » Tue Aug 20, 2013 3:58 pm

Thanks for the answer. Going through the forum, I noticed the bug from Memory Map was reported.

The trace log seems unsavable though (no window opens, even an 'open file' window). The same for the disassembled source (not 'Active Disassembly', just 'simple' disassembly).

As concerns the 'Active disassembly', is it possible to get rid of the 'dc.b' lines in partial disassembly ? If I want to disassemble just a small piece of code, disassembled code is scattered among lots of uninterpreted 'dc.b' code, and can be difficult to read (of course, it's easy to make a script deleting those lines, so not too much a big deal).

It could be interesting too to automatically generate useful comments on instructions accessing special locations (VDP for example). I think IDA pro with a proper plugins does that.

For the documentation, I understand perfectly you're lacking time. So don't you want to make an open wiki where people could post abd criticize their experiments ? You'd only have supervision tasks.

Apart that, I must say that I'm really enthousiast about this program. It's a pleasure to study codes.

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