Re: A82: ideas and stuff


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Re: A82: ideas and stuff




>I am going to totally redo the ASH <-> OShell-82 Development Kit once I
>finish SQRXZ 82.  This will have a 32-bit IDE in which you can do
>everything you just mentioned.  It will also have (hopefully) a converter
>to every shell and platform (except possibly the 92).  The emulator won't
>need a ROM image since everything will be built into the emulator (TI,
you
>don't need to worry, I won't be using any of your source code from the
>ROM...just the memory locations of the routines).  The emulator will be
>integrated into the IDE through a debugger which will catch every
possible
>crash (stack, self-edit, external edit, etc) and will jump to the error
in
>the source.


Converting programs to other platforms automatically might be very hard
because of the differences in RAM and ROM. 

I think that it will be better if you make it possible to use a ROM image
for emulating. Both Ash and CrASH uses some undocumented functions in the
ROM which it will be very hard to implement yourself. Besides that there
are a lot of functions to write if you are going to support all the
ROM_CALLs used by asm programs. Besides that new functions might be found
in the ROM, and these wont work with your program if you can not use a ROM
image.

How are you going to catch every possible error ?

Some programs might leave information on the stack on purpose ! (This can
actually be very useful, and it is used a lot in the ROM)

Letting your program edit it self is a really useful tool, which can
reduce the size of your program. I have used it several times in Ash, and
it is not possible to make a Crash/Ash compatible shell without it (unless
you slow down the programs it is running). Program using FP math and
routines which I created for Ash 3.1 will need to do this in order to use
some of the math functions. Some programs store data in the prgm var, and
this will some times be changed too.

If people start making games which uses external levels it wont be
possible for you to catch all "external edit errors".

To make this work it seem to me that you need to know what part of a
program is data and what is code, how are you going to get this
information ? (some .DB's are used to enter code !).

Some time ago I tested a Windows 95 program which was a bit like yours. It
allowed you to edit asm programs in a Win95 like IDE, with button compile,
ink ... It also had all the 82-*.TXT files included in the online help
which was quite useful. If you are able to make a program with the
functions you mention I think it would be great, but personally I would
rather have a version with only some of the functions now, than wait
forever until it you have written it all (like SQRXZ).

Dines

_______________________________________

Dines Justesen
Email: dines@post1.com or
       c958362@student.dtu.dk
WWW  : http://www.gbar.dtu.dk/~c958362/
_______________________________________