Jul -- General Game/ROM Hacking: Advent - Integrated SNES Debugger Plugin

MathOnNapkins
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Posted on 10-07-10 05:37:27 PM

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(cross posted from RHDN)

Imporant: While it could be used by a novice SNES 65c816 hacker, this set of tools is primarily aimed at experienced users that are jaded with the SNES debugging status quo

Advent is a plugin for Notepad++ that bridges the gap between the textual aspect of coding assembly language for the SNES and actually running it in an emulator debugger. It is modeled to some extent after Visual Studio (and other similar graphical frontends to debuggers). Advent as a whole could be thought of as an entity depending upon three modules:

The Advent plugin DLL (authored by yours truly)
A special build of byuu's xkas version 0.06 (see http://byuu.org/programming/)
A special build of byuu's bsnes version 0.67 (the debugger build)
This is quite a specific set of tools, but nothing about this setup necessarily dictates that they be used. Notepad++ is Windows only but a comparable editor on Linux or Mac could have a similar plugin developed. Geiger's Debugger could be interfaced with this debugging protocol without too much fuss. Other assemblers could output the same debugger information. In fact the debug information format ought to be rewritten in the future to be more compact and contain more information, but that's getting ahead of ourselves.

One thing I should note is that xkas v0.06 has macros and this presented a bit of a stumbling block for outputting debugging information. So stepping over / into a macro may make it seem like you've lost the current line marker, but it will reemerge after the end of the macro. Currently only the first instruction of a macro will register in the debug file.

Download Link
(contains a readme with instructions)
http://math.arc-nova.org/Releases/Advent_v010.zip

BSNES screenshots:
early image showing remote breakpoint enable / disable
current (tad ugly) image showing added stepping commands

Notepad++ screenshots:
early image using stock marker symbols
later screenshot with custom marker symbols added
current screenshot showing debugger commands

Imporant: I'm not interested in any complaints about the current tools involved (see the arguments above for why it is irrelevant to complain about them)

By complaints, I generally mean critiques along these lines, not actual bugs:
Complaint: "bsnes is slow on my computer"
My response: it's not perfect on my computer either

Complaint: "Notepad++?!!! Why don't you use Notepad2 / Crimson Edit / TextPad / MaxiPad / Notepad Advent Children / etc?"
My response: that's like, your opinion, man

Complaint: "xkas v0.06 is discontinued"
My response: yeah but a lot of people still use it b/c later versions, while having cleaner syntax, lack features that v0.06 had, and at least in my peer group v0.06 still seems to be widely used.

Glad we got those out of the way. Hope at least someone has some fun with this.

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Maxwell

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Posted on 10-07-10 10:15:10 PM

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This is pretty amazing

so this is kinda like the missing link between the debugger and the complier that strings them together in a pleasant looking way? If so this could be the thing that may get me started with SNES homebrew.

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MathOnNapkins
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Posted on 10-08-10 02:01:54 AM

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Now that you mention it, this would actually work a lot better for homebrew than for rom hacking, b/c with a homebrew you (almost certainly) have access to all the code being assembled.

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Sukasa

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Posted on 10-09-10 01:59:39 AM

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	This has seriously piqued my curiosity. A VS-inspired SNES debugging (and dev?) suite has a ton of potential. I'll definitely be downloading this stuff and having a look at it. ____________________ * hydrapheetz puts on the kittydunce hat

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