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WinApe as a development tool

Started by AugustoRuiz, 22:56, 11 March 09

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AugustoRuiz

Hello all,
I'm using WinApe (a great emulator IMHO) as my primary CPC development tool... Is there any way to contact the author to make some suggestions?
It would be very nice, for example, if we had a window while debugging for displaying variable values. Variables could be the bytes next to a label definition, and depending on the definition used (defb, defw, defs) a different number of bytes could be shown...
Cheers!

Executioner

Quote from: AugustoRuiz on 22:56, 11 March 09
Is there any way to contact the author to make some suggestions?

Yes, I'm here from time to time, and will be back on the Zone when it's forum is up again.

Good idea. It would probably be silly to show the data for all symbols, but I might put some code in DB/DW etc if the address is the same as the last label to set up the label to display bytes/words etc. It would probably help if you could resize the grid though.

AugustoRuiz

Yes, that would be great! Thanks for answering.The other suggestion I have is about porting WinApe to Linux... Are there any plans to do so? If not... Would you like somebody (like me) to port it?

andyt31

WinApe on Linux would be great - especially as there are a lot of netbook users running linux now.

There are other emus for linux - but ive not had much success with them.

fano

#4
Hi executionner , i know Winape is already a lot of work but this is just a little request about + emulation :
http://cpcwiki.eu/forum/index.php/topic,103.15.html#msg908
"NOP" is the perfect program : short , fast and (known) bug free

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AugustoRuiz

By the way... Some other suggestion: Adding Undo/Redo to source code editor would be VERY nice...  ;)

Executioner

Quote from: AugustoRuiz on 00:39, 13 March 09
By the way... Some other suggestion: Adding Undo/Redo to source code editor would be VERY nice...  ;)

This is a major feature to get working, but I'm going to get it in the next release.

nivrig

Can I get a request in to add memory watchpoints to the debugger?

ie: trigger a breakpoint when the contents of a memory location (or range of locations) changes. Maybe define a data area and have an option to "watch for changes" ?

Thanks for listening :)

zeropolis79

I use WinAPE to redevelop my text adventures (considering the lack of a real CPC)..

An idea - one of the Spectrum emulators uses an external editor for coding BASIC (which I used to develop my Frontier of Warriors loader on it) and it relayed it to the Spectrum enviroment in the emulator - could something like that be done with WinAPE?

lachlank

#9
Hi all, I have been using WinApe to develop a CPC game and have been sitting on a big list of "nice to have" feature requests for Richard... But have been too sheepish to email him!
Here they are in no particular order:
  • Undo (Ctrl-z) for assembler.
  • Bulk indenting by tab or shift-tab
  • Collapse or expand sections of code a-la Visual Studio (maybe via special comments?)
  • Find all references to symbol function (by right-click symbol or from symbol table)
  • Go to symbol def by right click in editor
  • Enable/Disable breakpoints in debugger. Add enable/disable to list of breakpoints (a-la Visual Studio)
  • Debug "Console" with assembler commands to "write" memory or registers to console i.e. console.write "af: " + af. OR console.write "number of lives" + (lives). Not sure how this would actually be implemented? Maybe keep a dictionary of PC,console expression for when line is hit?
  • Save all function for editor (Ctrl-Shift-S).
  • Stars in the tab heading of unsaved .asm files.
  • A help page with all valid z-80 commands and/or all firmware calls.
  • Stop debugger window jumping to default screen location on step! This is really annoying with dual monitors of different sizes as the debugger ends up split across the two screens.
  • Add to debugger a "watch window" where important memory addresses (or symbols?) can be monitored without having to jump around in memory.
  • Code coverage function - select a block of memory, run until pause, set any memory not "run through" as data, disassemble all else.

I guess what I am asking for is MS Visual Studio (which I use at work every day) for CPC assembler development! Maybe that is a tall order...
Is there any way that WinApe development could be farmed out? I would be happy to contribute... Is it open source?At this point I would like to congratulate Richard on his amazing piece of software and my wish-list is in no way a criticism of what he has built.
Lachlan Keown

Grim

I noticed that the assembler in WinAPE supports the BRK directive from MAXAM, which is compiled as a RST #30 (opcode &F7).
Could it be updated to compile as &ED,&FF to produce a breakpoint for WinAPE?

Executioner

Quote from: Grim on 17:19, 17 June 09
I noticed that the assembler in WinAPE supports the BRK directive from MAXAM, which is compiled as a RST #30 (opcode &F7).
Could it be updated to compile as &ED,&FF to produce a breakpoint for WinAPE?

Not really, as I want to maintain Maxam compatibility as much as possible. You could override it with a macro though, eg.

macro brk:db #ed,#ff:endm

Grim

I didn't thought about using a macro, that will do fine, thanks! :)

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