Dosbox and Debugger with ImGUI frontend

[LowLevelMahn]

found this ImGUI based dosbox frontend

https://github.com/Patedam/DebugDosBox

a little outdated but still interesting

[kcgen]

Nice find! ImGUI is something @dreamer wants to incorporate for various GUI feedback and OSD purposes.
This looks great.

I think the way to work on this would be to:

1. I can create a feature branch (at the project level)
2. Developers working on this would branch off this have write access to merge into it (plus the usual CI gates).
3. The feature branch would be rebased against the master so it never falls behind or has risk of divergence.
4. Developers could work on this over many months, incrementally improving it.
5. The initial goal would be to reach functional-parity with the existing debugger.
6. Once it reaches parity and is stable, we'd merge the feature branch and drop the old debugger.

We've used this approach for SDL2, GUS, and Meson, as these were non-trivial changes that had to progress them over several months.

[kcgen]

References from @kklobe :

• https://sites.google.com/site/pcdosretro/enhdebug
• https://www.scummvm.org/news/20180331/

[kcgen]

@GranMinigun reported that Ghidra has a debugger in current beta.

[LowLevelMahn]

the problem with real dos debuggers is that they mostly based on real hardware - for example SoftIce does not run under dosbox

the best what i've seen so far is https://github.com/wjp/idados - a dosbox extension that allows debugging of 16/32bit software in IDA Pro using dosbox as the backend

would be interesting to see if the Ghidra Debugger got a API or something to attach it to dosbox

[dreamer]

I do like this interface that @Patedam implemented - yeah, our long-term goal is to get rid of debugger TUI and dependency on curses and have something very similar (but only for debugger builds - for normal builds I have something different in mind). Can't comment on code quality though, as the code was dumped in a big single commit in the repo.

[Patedam]

I do like this interface that @Patedam implemented - yeah, our long-term goal is to get rid of debugger TUI and dependency on curses and have something very similar (but only for debugger builds - for normal builds I have something different in mind). Can't comment on code quality though, as the code was dumped in a big single commit in the repo.

Thanks.
I launched this project to debug something a while ago, code is very hackish but wanted to share the project in case someone wanted to use it. There are a lot of bugs too, but it was enough to do what i needed at the time :)

[dreamer]

@Patedam do you remember which SVN revision you used as a base for your implementation?

[LowLevelMahn]

could be tags/RELEASE_0_74_2 - revision 4156

[Patedam]

I'm not 100% sure but i have a zip of R4175 so that should be this one.

[LowLevelMahn]

it seems to be 4175 but beside the huge imgui stuff also multiple small changes

-add imgui code
-SDL2 port stuff
-cdrom support disabling (due to SDL2)
-small src/dos/*.cpp changes (some for removing cdrom support, others for callstack stuff)

are all the changes are based on your work or did you used some patches (like the SDL2 port stuff etc.)
just to understand how the change history really is

[Patedam]

Yes i did a very basic port to SDL2, i think i took a snippet of code on vogons.org but i dont remember which one.

[LowLevelMahn]

i would rebased into a dosbox staging svn/trunk 4175 based branch and
add a IMGUI_DEBUGGER #define that separates all the big and tiny changes from the base code - that does not work for the newly added cpp/hpp files but its then maybe easier to merge with more recent versions of svn/trunk

[kcgen]

Archived discussion to https://github.com/dosbox-staging/archived-discussions-for-dosbox-staging