[comp.sys.ibm.pc] Nu-Mega Tech products: Soft-ICE & MagicCV

gutman@felix.UUCP (Andrew Gutman) (01/18/89)

Any one have any experience with any of these products ? 
They are debuggers tailored for 386s. I have a need to
know if the products lived up to/exceeded expectations
for debugging in a DOS environment; are they useful for
tracking un-initialized and null pointers problems and other
difficulties that present themselves in the DOS environment?

cramer@optilink.UUCP (Clayton Cramer) (01/19/89)

In article <79284@felix.UUCP>, gutman@felix.UUCP (Andrew Gutman) writes:
> Any one have any experience with any of these products ? 
> They are debuggers tailored for 386s. I have a need to
> know if the products lived up to/exceeded expectations
> for debugging in a DOS environment; are they useful for
> tracking un-initialized and null pointers problems and other
> difficulties that present themselves in the DOS environment?

I'm using MagicCV as a way of getting around the 640K RAM limit
of PCDOS.  CodeView now runs in one 640K virtual machine, and my
application run in another, and all my symbols are up in EMS
memory.  It works very reliably, and allows me to debug stuff 
that would otherwise be impossible, because of CodeView's size.

-- 
Clayton E. Cramer
{pyramid,pixar,tekbspa}!optilink!cramer
Disclaimer?  You must be kidding!  No company would hold opinions like mine!

john@stiatl.UUCP (John DeArmond) (01/19/89)

In article <79284@felix.UUCP> gutman@felix.UUCP (Andrew Gutman) writes:
>Any one have any experience with any of these products ? 
>They are debuggers tailored for 386s. I have a need to
>know if the products lived up to/exceeded expectations
>for debugging in a DOS environment; are they useful for
>tracking un-initialized and null pointers problems and other
>difficulties that present themselves in the DOS environment?


I've  been using the Magic-CV for about 6months and  Soft-Ice for
perhaps 2.  I'm well pleased with the products.  They seem to work
as advertised on my compaq 386.

I have not had the occasion to track down a null pointer yet but from
the  docs, it appears fairly easy to do.  My biggest use to date has 
been to debug an application that used ALL of available RAM and to 
break a copy-protection scheme.  As impressive as the functioning 
is the tech support I've received.  I found a bug in MCV that crashed my
machine.  I modemed a copy of the offending software to them and the
next morning, they called with a DEBUG patch to fix the problem. Try
THAT with MicroSloth.

The only other comment is that the new turbo-c  debugger  seems to have
most of the functionality of the Nu-Mega products.  I'd look at both
before committing time and money.

john

-- 
John De Armond, WD4OQC                     | "I can't drive 85!"
Sales Technologies, Inc.    Atlanta, GA    | Sammy Hagar driving 
...!gatech!stiatl!john                     | thru Atlanta!