I had an idea for an emulator feature yesterday. Don't recall having seen this idea before, but I'm sure you'll correct me if it has. :)
In that case I wouldn't be the one who came up with it, but it would still be a good idea and could come in handy if some emulator supported it.
Often when I use an emulator, I use it for debugging something, and I thought it could be very handy, that instead of having to step through something manually, you could call up some sort of graphical representation of memory and see where the game reads and writes - to get an idea of where and what the program is doing, what it's doing. Three modes that you could change between, adresses being read from, written to and finally where instructions are being executed - ie. the programcounter.
This way you can start it while the program is executing some sort of graphical routine or something and call this thing up for as long as it lasts, or perhaps even see it 'live' and see (example) that the program is reading data from 25000 to 25500, writing data at 32768 to 36000 and running code from 59000 to 63000 - all represented using colors in a window where each pixel is equal to one memory address.
It would make it easier to see where you'd have concentrate your effort. And if a word was used as a counter instead of a byte, to keep track of menory access, you could even have shades showing the degree of access - light for fewer accesses and darker the "closer" you would get to the heart of the routine you wanted to tear apart.
Could be very handy and should be easy enough to program I should think?
[ This Message was edited by: Sokurah on 2004-12-08 23:21 ]
In that case I wouldn't be the one who came up with it, but it would still be a good idea and could come in handy if some emulator supported it.
Often when I use an emulator, I use it for debugging something, and I thought it could be very handy, that instead of having to step through something manually, you could call up some sort of graphical representation of memory and see where the game reads and writes - to get an idea of where and what the program is doing, what it's doing. Three modes that you could change between, adresses being read from, written to and finally where instructions are being executed - ie. the programcounter.
This way you can start it while the program is executing some sort of graphical routine or something and call this thing up for as long as it lasts, or perhaps even see it 'live' and see (example) that the program is reading data from 25000 to 25500, writing data at 32768 to 36000 and running code from 59000 to 63000 - all represented using colors in a window where each pixel is equal to one memory address.
It would make it easier to see where you'd have concentrate your effort. And if a word was used as a counter instead of a byte, to keep track of menory access, you could even have shades showing the degree of access - light for fewer accesses and darker the "closer" you would get to the heart of the routine you wanted to tear apart.
Could be very handy and should be easy enough to program I should think?
[ This Message was edited by: Sokurah on 2004-12-08 23:21 ]