BRACKENRIDGE%USC-ISIB@sri-unix.UUCP (07/05/83)
From: Billy <BRACKENRIDGE@USC-ISIB> I have been working the last few days with the CodeSmith debugger from Erik Osborn (aka Visual Age). I strongly recommend purchase of this product to the INFO-IBMPC audience. This debugger makes effective use of windows. There is a command & status display window, an interactive debugger window, and up to eight memory display windows. The best feature of this debugger is the ability to save and restore the user's screen image. One can single step through code switching from debugger display to screen display with a key stroke. You can disassemble code and write it to a file in a format that can be read by the IBM assembler. Of course you have to add ASSUME and PROC statements etc. There are no symbolic labels, but that's Microsoft's fault. Pseudo labels are promised in the next mini-release and a C and Pascal debugging is promised for the longer term. At this time patches cannot be made in the instruction debugging window. You must switch to one of the dump windows and make hex patches. The program makes nice use of the monochrome display in that breakpoints are highlighted and the current instruction is underlined. The major glaring omission is lack of support for the color graphics card. This will be fixed soon. Erik's interest lie in the graphics area and this is a high priority item. The bad news is that the program is not complete. I have serial number 11 and it has some bugs. There are some problems with the loader that will be fixed before any more systems are shipped. Specifically the linker in DOS 2.0 puts out different code from the linker in DOS 1.1 and CodeSmith wasn't prepared for the changes. I am temporarily running with the old linker. I believe it is worth the $145 price to get the program now as the future enhancements will come with a $20 update fee. Future releases promise a full screen editor and background submission of assemblies and compiles. I hope everybody has lots of memory as the program is now 60K bytes plus overlays and 40K for the stack. Visual Age isn't one of these over financed slick companies. You won't find any ads in PC magazine for a while as I doubt he can afford it. I hope people remember this is a one man operation when they pass around copies of this program. There is no copy protection, but each program comes with a herald that prints out the name and address of the original purchaser, along with the standard starving artist plea. Visual Age 642 N. Larchmont Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 90004 (213) 464-8141 The telephone number will get you Erik's accountant's office. They can't answer technical questions, but he has been very responsive particularly in regards to my problem with the DOS 2.0 linker. The CodeSmith debugger has its own built in loader. It appears not to work correctly with output from the DOS 2.0 linker. My code has the following sequence: MOV AX,WORKAREA MOV DS,AX WORKAREA is the segment name of the place where I keep static variables. If I link this code with DOS 2.0 linker and load it with the CodeSmith loader each instantiation of this code will produce a different address for WORKAREA. If I use the DOS 1.1 linker CodeSmith will load the code correctly. DOS 2.0 debug and the system loader load the code correctly in all cases I have tested. Does anyone know what changes were made in the form of .EXE files between DOS 1.1 and DOS 2.0? Assembler horror story: Erik Osborn tells me the dissassembly portion of his debugger is coded using a 110 line macro. I don't know how many lines long the module is, but due to repeated application of this macro the assembly takes six hours. Does anybody care to submit an entry to top this?