Aiming for symbolic debugging?

[PkK]

Some Emulators have support for debugging at the assembler level, via an integrated disassembler.

However, many programmers write their programs in C, and being able to have symbolic debugging would help with program development. We can't have that on the hardware (the ColecoVision hardware doesn't support it), but we could have it in emulators.

Being able to set breakpoints in C code, or quickly see the content of variables would be helpful.

I think it could be possible to create an interface for GDB, the GNU debugger, in an emulator. But I'm not an emulator author (apart from an experimental ColecoVision emulator that I wrote long ago, and that worked for some ColecoVision games only), so someone else would have to do that.

 

What I think I could do, however, is to make the z80 backend in SDCC emit ELF binaries with DWARF debug info, suitable for use with GDB.

Edited October 2, 2021 by PkK
Fixed typo

[+digress]

I just print variables on the coleco game screen when debugging and comment it out once resolved.

 

 

[+bhall408]

For consoles/systems that had a serial port, you could do debuggin output in your code to that. I'd done that back in Lisa/Mac Plus days.

 

Along similar lines, I could see it making sense to have an emulator support console debug output, as a similar way.

[youki]

i have a script that generate symbol for BlueMSX debugger.

 

But in general , most of the time, i just display variable on screen.