Current state of developer-friendly emulators?

djcouchycouch · Post by **djcouchycouch** » Mon Jul 29, 2013 1:35 pm

Hello,

I'm currently using a custom version of GensKMod for debugging. (Basically just a few UI tweaks) It's useful to me because the SGDK can send debug output to its output message window. I realize that it's not the most up-to-date emulator, so are there more recent emulators that 1) are developer friendly (ie lots of cpu/vdp info) and 2) can handle SGDK's output messages?

Thanks!
DJCC

Nemesis · Post by **Nemesis** » Tue Jul 30, 2013 10:46 pm

Well there's my emulator Exodus that I've just released recently:
http://www.exodusemulator.com
It's developer oriented, but it's also cycle accurate and fairly demanding hardware wise, so depending on your system you might have trouble pulling a reasonable framerate. It also doesn't handle the output messages from SGDK, but it's going open source very soon, so you or someone else could write an extension to handle these debug messages. I'm planning to have integrated source editing and compilation in the future, so it can be a full-on development and debugging environment.

djcouchycouch · Post by **djcouchycouch** » Wed Jul 31, 2013 1:03 pm

Nemesis wrote:Well there's my emulator Exodus that I've just released recently:
http://www.exodusemulator.com
It's developer oriented, but it's also cycle accurate and fairly demanding hardware wise, so depending on your system you might have trouble pulling a reasonable framerate. It also doesn't handle the output messages from SGDK, but it's going open source very soon, so you or someone else could write an extension to handle these debug messages. I'm planning to have integrated source editing and compilation in the future, so it can be a full-on development and debugging environment.

Oh that's right!

It's too bad my machine's a million years old, though!

r57shell · Post by **r57shell** » Wed Jul 31, 2013 11:56 pm

In gens rerecording, or its modifications, you can use lua scripts to output debug info.
For example, just make somewhere dummy with only "rts" opcode, but use it with some "protocol": put debug info into registers.
Then in lua, just use gens.registerexec(...) to get values needed, and gui.text() to draw it on screen. or simple log it by print()
Or log it by f=io.open(...) f:write(something).
You can even make client-server connection, as I did for live play translation of emulator :S. I call it "observer" script

For debuging purposes I use my modification of gens rerecording. Here is description on russian.

Karate_Sniper · Post by **Karate_Sniper** » Thu Aug 01, 2013 7:04 pm

Exodus is really an awesome thing, but man, it eats my CPU for breakfast...The sound lags on an i3 cpu. Nontheless, this is what i was searching for in a long time. Gens K mod doesnt seem to like the tfm engine and my game hangs on the emu while it runs fine on real hw.
A galaxy of thanks for Exodus!

BigEvilCorporation · Post by **BigEvilCorporation** » Tue Oct 22, 2013 9:36 am

Nemesis wrote: I'm planning to have integrated source editing and compilation in the future

Yes, yes, yes, this!

As much as I adore my MegaCD development kit, it's a bit of a pain to set up every time a have a dev session! An emulator with source-level debugger that I can run on Windows 7 means I can make games on the train!

MintyTheCat · Post by **MintyTheCat** » Sat Oct 26, 2013 11:52 am

BigEvilCorporation wrote:
Nemesis wrote: I'm planning to have integrated source editing and compilation in the future
Yes, yes, yes, this!

As much as I adore my MegaCD development kit, it's a bit of a pain to set up every time a have a dev session! An emulator with source-level debugger that I can run on Windows 7 means I can make games on the train!

Hi,

or you could try UMDK:

http://www.makestuff.eu/wordpress/categ ... ts/umdkv2/

This way you could simply use GDB.

To run it under Windows will require that you have a Backend for GDB. I'd build a GCC for 68K under Windows using something like Cygwin.

Cheers.

djcouchycouch · Post by **djcouchycouch** » Sat Oct 26, 2013 12:29 pm

The link doesn't work. For me at least

MintyTheCat · Post by **MintyTheCat** » Sat Oct 26, 2013 11:43 pm

djcouchycouch wrote:The link doesn't work. For me at least

It works at GMT+1 1:43, Sun, Oct 27 2013.

djcouchycouch · Post by **djcouchycouch** » Sun Oct 27, 2013 12:42 am

MintyTheCat wrote:
djcouchycouch wrote:The link doesn't work. For me at least
It works at GMT+1 1:43, Sun, Oct 27 2013.

Ok, now it does

BigEvilCorporation · Post by **BigEvilCorporation** » Mon Oct 28, 2013 10:44 am

MintyTheCat wrote: or you could try UMDK

I've been keeping my eye on this for quite some time, it looks very exciting! Are they available to buy assembled yet, or do I need to brush up on my electronics then order the PCB and components?