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Beginners > Debugging Methods

#19443 - CyberSlag5k - Tue Apr 20, 2004 3:51 am

What debugging methods are commonly used in gba development? Obviously cout is out of the question and when I tried to write out to a file, my program wouldnt' compile. The command prompt just filled with garbage. Mappy VM doesn't seem to have anything I can really read as far as debugging goes... So what methods are there to debug a working program?

#19445 - yaustar - Tue Apr 20, 2004 4:11 am

Use insight GDB and VBA SDL

if you go to the faq section on visualboy advance, you should find a lot of the material there as well as the neccessary files. Someone posted another guide around here which you should be able to search for
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#19448 - poslundc - Tue Apr 20, 2004 4:57 am

The tools built into the Windows version of VBA make debugging a breeze once you've played around with them a little.

Dan.

#19454 - NoMis - Tue Apr 20, 2004 9:27 am

There are several ways to debug. The most emus have internal debuggers, like the MappyVM, but the most of them have major bugs ( i never pulled it of to debug in mappy). But the best opportunity at the moment is using gdb like yauster said. It works pretty fine and you can use a bunch of UI's like Insight GDB or Eclipse (my favorite :-]).

NoMis

#19456 - Cearn - Tue Apr 20, 2004 10:20 am

If you need a quick glance at some numbers, the VBA memory viewer is your friend. Put in some static variables or write to spefic locations and see what happens. I imagine this could be a pain with bigger things, though.

#19457 - FluBBa - Tue Apr 20, 2004 10:33 am

You can also use SWI 0xFF0000 (in ARM) under VBA dev/SDL as a print out passing the text pointer in r0, this crashes on hardware though.
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#19485 - sajiimori - Tue Apr 20, 2004 8:34 pm

Recently I've taken to writing games that run natively on both PC and GBA, so I can use all my native debugging tools.