info-vax@ucbvax.ARPA (07/31/85)
From: *Hobbit* <AWalker@RUTGERS.ARPA> Under 4.x, DBG has changed considerably for the worse in its handling of registers. Instead of referring to then as Rn, they use this asinine %Rn construct, which is a DBG-permanent symbol that refers to someplace in memory where DBG presumably stores your user registers. You can deposit and examine them in the usual fashion, **UNTIL** .... The little routine you were just executing blams into an error and returns with some non-normal status. Then, the useless trash will *not* let you modify registers!! You can deposit away to your heart's content, and DBG just returns like it did it, but you'll find that your registers contain something dumbass like 80010FFE and there it stays. What I'm doing here is RUN/DEB on some image or other, with the idea of looking for a few longwords here and there. So I type in this little 4-instruction thing to compare the contents of r7 with some address pointed to by r8, and return [to DBG] on a match. DBG does eventually return, with some message that VMS can't associate a string with, and then I can't do squat with my registers after that. How do I convince DBG that I still want to do things, and it should behave itself so I *don't* wind up throwing my manuals across the room?? _H* -------