tandy put their sound chip on the 1A interrupt?

[foone@digipres.club]

so when it sets up a city that has hints to lead to Tokyo, it picks 3 of these sets of questions, then picks a question in each set.

[foone@digipres.club]

tool that'd really be handy right now:
a "live" version of binxelview, so I can step through the DOSBox-x debugger and see how memory is changing in real time, as an image.

[foone@digipres.club]

that might not be TOO hard to hack in, hmm.

[foone@digipres.club]

I'm stepping through a high-level loading routine I don't understand yet, trying to figure out when it decompresses an image by watching the RAM it uses for file loading and decompression and spotting when the image appears

[foone@digipres.club]

sadly DOSBox-X's memory breakpoints don't let you set up a breakpoint that covers a whole 64k. you only get one byte. A shame.

[foone@digipres.club]

ooh, I'd also need to be able to watch multiple address ranges at once. that'd be sweet, multiple windows of visibility into RAM

[foone@digipres.club]

I'm in Paris, I look at work ram, I see the image of the Eiffel. I head to Rome, and before I load the next image, I can see that the Eiffle tower in workram now has the wrong stride.
That's odd, because it means it had to rewrite the image in memory, the image it's about to unload.

[foone@digipres.club]

I think this might be the GUI system doing a screenshot of the image under a window, so it can restore it at the end. And it still does that here, even though we'll never need to restore that image: we're about to overwrite it

[foone@digipres.club]

Here's what I want a tool to do:
I hit a breakpoint in the debugger, I turn it on, set another breakpoint, and hit go.
between those two breakpoints, every time a CALL instruction is hit, it dumps my selected memory region. If it's identical to the last dump, it's ignored.
At the end, each dump is rendered as an image, and the combined set are an animation I can scroll through.

[foone@digipres.club]

I need a higher order debugger. I'm doing too much shit manually

[ongion@mendeddrum.org]

@foone not sure if you could use it for older programs, but have you ever used Time Travel Debugging?

[foone@digipres.club]

GOT YOU, YOU SON OF A BITCH! I FOUND YOU.

[foone@digipres.club]

@Ongion I've not, no. It sounds awesome, but sadly it doesn't seem it's usable for my usual ancient-software-reversing tasks

[foone@digipres.club]

it's in a function I already found, temporarily named "blit_related".

I guess they don't decode the image until RIGHT before it needs to go up on the screen!

[foone@digipres.club]

if definitely decompresses and then blits the image as two parts, which aren't evenly sized, and it starts from the bottom

[foone@digipres.club]

I think they're just trying to keep their RAM usage down by not having both halves in memory at once

[rakslice@mastodon.social]

@foone this sounds like a job for whatever scripting the debugger supports?

[foone@digipres.club]

@rakslice
new side project: add scripting to this debugger

[foone@digipres.club]

wait is this image format vertically interlaced!?

[foone@digipres.club]

It loads the half-width version, then a few functions later, it's been replaced with a full-width version.
Strange!