#144645 - HyperHacker - Mon Nov 05, 2007 9:01 am
So am I the only one who's used No$GMB and found it extremely buggy and rather limited in capability? No$GBA is a marked improvement but it always bothers me when people talk about how great No$GMB was when it had so freaking many stupid bugs, as if they somehow didn't even notice them.
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#144646 - wintermute - Mon Nov 05, 2007 9:28 am
| HyperHacker wrote: |
| So am I the only one who's used No$GMB and found it extremely buggy and rather limited in capability? No$GBA is a marked improvement but it always bothers me when people talk about how great No$GMB was when it had so freaking many stupid bugs, as if they somehow didn't even notice them. |
Yes, I'm afraid so.
I find the phase "extremely buggy and rather limited in capability" to be rather exaggerated.
Every one of the commercial GBC developers I knew who used no$gmb was *extremely* happy with it. Many of us tracked bugs that would have been impossible to debug without the aid of no$gmb.
I'm not even sure why you choose to complain so loudly about it either. Are you deliberately setting out to try to tarnish Martin's reputation?
This post wasn't even relevant to the topic at hand. Split to offtopic
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#144650 - HyperHacker - Mon Nov 05, 2007 11:02 am
I just wanted to know why so many people praise No$GMB without any mention of the numerous bugs. It's been a while since I've used it but here's what I can recall off the top of my head:
-Failure to handle spaces in paths in some places. Loading a file from F:\Games\Game Boy actually creates the directory F:\Games\Game for some reason.
-When tracing, it leaks memory until eventually the interface breaks, drawing in the wrong place, with the wrong font, etc.
-Every now and then - often after installing Visual Studio - it will just stop working entirely until I put it in Windows 98 Compatibility Mode, or take it out if it already was.
-Trying to put a breakpoint on code in RAM crashes the program.
-I have never been able to get it to load ROMs from the command line. At best it will try and say file not found. Only loading from within the program works.
-Gameshark codes often just don't do anything. It's not that the codes are broken - sometimes they work, and they're just fine in other emulators and real hardware.
-Print Screen is hardwired to save a screenshot, but doesn't override the default behaviour assigned by Windows, so every time you take a screenshot of the game, your clipboard is replaced by a shot of the entire screen.
Does nobody else have these problems? Indeed it's a great program, but with so many bugs, it gets to be a pain to use. I just find it difficult to believe that either nobody else has these problems, or they never bother to mention them.
As for "limited in capability", the biggest issue was not being able to break on reads, only on writes. IIRC breakpoints on I/O registers didn't work either, and there was no support for the GBC I/R port. You also couldn't use anything but the ASCII character set in the memory viewer, which was a pain because Game Boy games rarely used ASCII. Having the memory viewer update while the game runs, instead of only when it stops, was another thing I yearned for. Yeah, it's powerful, but I so often found myself wondering "why doesn't it support this?"
Of course, No$GBA is certainly better in both of these aspects, having fixed most of the bugs and added more features than you'd ever need.
| wintermute wrote: |
| This post wasn't even relevant to the topic at hand. Split to offtopic |
Huh, I could swear I quoted the post mentioning No$GMB that I was replying to. >_>
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#144656 - stampede_dude - Mon Nov 05, 2007 1:16 pm
Yeah, that's the thing, you're talking about the Win32 version, which isn't really fair. NO$GMB runs great under DOS for me, and even though I wasn't looking for them, the bugs aren't noticeable if you're just playing games, which is all I really do with it. Even if it does have bugs, I doubt you'll find an emulator that works as well as it does under a 75mhz p1 with 32MB of RAM...
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#144664 - tepples - Mon Nov 05, 2007 1:44 pm
| HyperHacker wrote: |
| Does nobody else have these problems? |
I don't know of anybody else who still develops for the 8-bit Game Boy as a serious business.
| Quote: |
| You also couldn't use anything but the ASCII character set in the memory viewer, which was a pain because Game Boy games rarely used ASCII. |
Your game could have used the workaround used by several NES Mega Man games: store Latin strings as ASCII in ROM, then translate them to whatever Latin encoding the game uses when displaying them. Or are you talking about kana encodings?
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#144702 - HyperHacker - Mon Nov 05, 2007 10:33 pm
| stampede_dude wrote: |
| Yeah, that's the thing, you're talking about the Win32 version, which isn't really fair. NO$GMB runs great under DOS for me |
Does anyone still use DOS? Am I expected to install DOSBox and lose the advantages of a Win32 app? I don't see how it's "unfair" to talk about bugs in the Win32 version when the vast majority of desktop computers run Win32.
| tepples wrote: |
| Quote: | | You also couldn't use anything but the ASCII character set in the memory viewer, which was a pain because Game Boy games rarely used ASCII. |
Your game could have used the workaround used by several NES Mega Man games: store Latin strings as ASCII in ROM, then translate them to whatever Latin encoding the game uses when displaying them. Or are you talking about kana encodings? |
If you do that, you're using up extra ROM space and CPU power to do an unnecessary conversion just to work around limitations of your debugger. Doesn't seem like a good idea. And yes, kana (or for that matter anything that's not in the ASCII set) could pose a problem too.
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#144704 - tepples - Mon Nov 05, 2007 10:46 pm
| HyperHacker wrote: |
| stampede_dude wrote: | | Yeah, that's the thing, you're talking about the Win32 version, which isn't really fair. NO$GMB runs great under DOS for me |
Does anyone still use DOS? |
Does anyone still use Sharp's 8080 clone?
| Quote: |
| Am I expected to install DOSBox and lose the advantages of a Win32 app? |
Am I supposed to solder together a Game Boy flash card and lose the advantages of an ARM7TDMI CPU?
| Quote: |
| I don't see how it's "unfair" to talk about bugs in the Win32 version when the vast majority of desktop computers run Win32. |
I don't see how it's "fair" to talk about bugs in the 8-bit Game Boy version when the vast majority of handheld video game systems run GBA.
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#144709 - Miked0801 - Mon Nov 05, 2007 11:24 pm
| Quote: |
So am I the only one who's used No$GMB and found it extremely buggy and rather limited in capability?
|
As compared to what?!? The POS Hardware that Nintendo supplied? LOL! That thing sucked so bad. Before we had no$, we were literally doing printf / crash the game on purpose to view state type debugging. That emulator made us x100 more productive. Hell, without it, we wouldn't have been able to do any of the cool scanline tricks we came up with. The only limitations we consistently ran into were the fact it only supported 256 colors so some of our hi-color images looked funny, it didn't 100% emulate the failures that occured during serial communications, and if you set a break-point in a RAM area, it could screw with game execution. It offered soooo much more though. Exceptions, breaks to memory read/rights conditional, the vram viewer, etc.
No$ advanced the state of the art of GB/GBC development. Look at some of the crap we did in Harry Potter Chamber of Secrets some time for some crazy ideas.
#144730 - sgeos - Tue Nov 06, 2007 3:40 am
The VRAM viewer is good stuff. That should be a standard feature in all *cough* level debugging tools.
-Brendan
#144736 - HyperHacker - Tue Nov 06, 2007 7:51 am
| tepples wrote: |
| Quote: | | I don't see how it's "unfair" to talk about bugs in the Win32 version when the vast majority of desktop computers run Win32. |
I don't see how it's "fair" to talk about bugs in the 8-bit Game Boy version when the vast majority of handheld video game systems run GBA. |
So in a discussion about a Game Boy debugger, we shouldn't mention bugs in the debugger because people don't make commercial Game Boy games anymore?
| Miked0801 wrote: |
| Quote: |
So am I the only one who's used No$GMB and found it extremely buggy and rather limited in capability?
|
As compared to what?!? |
Why does it need to be compared to anything? Whether some other tool has more or less bugs doesn't change the fact that No$ has bugs.
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#144759 - Miked0801 - Tue Nov 06, 2007 8:08 pm
Yes, it has bugs. No, I do not find that limiting. It was not "extremely" debugging nor rather limited IMO. It vastly expanded what I could do on GBC for next to nothing in cost. Same for No$GBA, but not quite to the same extent. No$ for the DS is still a bit too early in development for me to throw away my hardware debugger there yet, though I have no doubt that it will within a year.
BTW, yes, most commercial developers didn't hardly notice the bugs in the debugger/emulator because they were easy to navigate around and because the debugger offered so much.
#144875 - IIMarckus - Thu Nov 08, 2007 7:26 pm
Hey guys,
I'm just starting out in GB development and have used no$gmb (the free version) for a couple things. Only came across a couple of those bugs myself, most notably the tracing memory leak. That and the RAM breakpoint bug are the only ones that would bother me really, but then again I'm still inexperienced.
@stampede_dude: I'm using the win32 version right now. Do you know if the DOS version of the debugger doesn't have these bugs?
What other GB debuggers are there? I know of BGB... how does that compare to no$gmb?
HH, are you capable of coding your own debugger? It seems like it might be a good project related to Game Boy development.
And tepples, I stick with the DMG/CGB as a hobby. As I understand it there's a much larger difference between CGB/AGB ASM than between NES/SNES ASM, after all -- yet people still do NES dev. Right now I have little interest in AGB coding, though that may change (and it's really not a big deal).
#144881 - HyperHacker - Thu Nov 08, 2007 10:52 pm
| IIMarckus wrote: |
| What other GB debuggers are there? I know of BGB... how does that compare to no$gmb? |
bgb does a poor job of cloning No$GMB's interface. If you aren't careful you can deadlock it by switching windows at the wrong time. Besides that, it's pretty good, quite stable and has a few more features.
| Quote: |
| HH, are you capable of coding your own debugger? It seems like it might be a good project related to Game Boy development. |
I started on one, but I don't really have the spare time nor the hardware (for testing) to complete it.
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#144914 - Dood77 - Fri Nov 09, 2007 4:34 am
I remember back when I was probably 8 or 9... on my old Windows 95 machine, No$GMB was the first emulator I had discovered, and I bumbled around until I figured out how to play Pokemon.
Although I used to get this weird error where I would start a new game, and eventually after a few saves and coming back to the game, the left button would be held down constantly, and there wouldn't be any way to fix it unless I deleted the save and started over.
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