My toys are easy to debug for pro coders but they are growing and Its tedious to use printf everywhere. Can we have gdb or similar tools to debug our babys?

How do you do it?

Apparently, supervisor mode or at least interrupts are required for debuggers but that's not available in the a-box.

Never mind that low level drivers still work somehow...

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Using serial debug. That is, adding NewRawDoFmt("DEBUG PRINT", (APTR)1, NULL, ...) to interesting locations. In PowerSDL development I can build debug builds with debug prints enabled and analyze program flow.

Sometimes it could be useful to add break points (although it is not always safe on Amiga) and I workaround it using those debug prints to see what is going on.

If there is a hit I take chunk offset and dump (objdump --disassemble-all --reloc executable >executable.s) my program to find out where in the code that hit took place. It is sometimes tedious since I only get function name but not exact location (line number) to my code. If functions is longer I have to analyze it further from disassembly.

Interesting.
Can I use a notebook with a terminal linked with a serial cable??? need it to be a special cable?

Thanks

I have used only good old serial cable from Efika to another computer. But you dont need to use another computer if you redirect serial debug to ram (which is default on all machines, IIRC). Just make sure get dead lock so you can continue inspecting logs.

Ram logs can also survive reboot (not sure on Macs though) but OTOH it is easier if you have clean logs after reboot.

Enabling INVZEROPAGE might be good idea so you can track down illegal reads from zero page (writes to zero page are always illegal).

As long as you don't write lowlevel stuff or your app is totally crash happy, the use of kprintf() RamDebug and logtool should suffice.

You may also want to look at the macros used by Ambient (found in the download section on morphos.de).

In debug.h you will find PDB() which add sourcefile, function and linenumber to the output.

This will only be active while you have "DEBUG" defined (globally), so you can easily create a debug-free release by just removing that.

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Is there any advantage of using serial debug over an own debug message printing system?
(I mean, for not kernel/driver/... development)

I have made something similar what Kronos mentioned and works very well, but I also miss a real debugger very much.

afaik, the only working debugger with abilities to stop running programm, trace single line code etc is my own debugger, but it's for PowerD language only...

afaik, the only working debugger with abilities to stop running programm, trace single line code etc is my own debugger

Don't forget about LuaExplorador .

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Unfortunately the link doesn't work :(