Which purposes has the Dolphin´s debug mode?

[DJBarry004]

Hi, long time since creating threads.


I decided to experiment a bit with the debug mode of the emulator (see how it works and what things I can do, etc.) but I can´t seem to understand a lot of it, so I came here to ask for some help.

First, as the title says, which purposes does the mode have; what it was made for, exactly. Other thing is how to launch a game while using it (I tried with Luigi´s Mansion with the debug mode activated, and it first showed a call stack error on the left panel, then the game booted. Then it just freezed there and when I tried to stop it, the program stopped responding).

With that second thing I mean, how can I work with the debug mode when using any game.

Any reply is accepted and appreciated as well.

ADD: Oops, almost forgot to post the used build. I used 4.0-1302.

[RachelB]

It's for debugging, obviously.

[DJBarry004]

Yeah but, what kind of debugging? By the way it looks it seems to be for complex things.

[RachelB]

It's not for you if you can't figure that out yourself.

[kinkinkijkin]

(04-19-2014, 08:31 AM)RachelB Wrote: It's not for you if you can't figure that out yourself.

This is exactly the answer.

If you can't make out the debug stuff, you shouldn't be looking at it.

[Shonumi]

I guess DJBarry has a general idea of what debugging looks like in software in general, but probably wants to know more about how Dolphin as an emulator uses it.

You're emulating a very complex machine in software, meaning there are a lot of moving parts working in conjunction. If there's a problem in emulation, it's very helpful to be able to "see" what's going on inside any of the individual components at any given time. Of course, you could stare at the code and shout "What's wrong with it?!" but that's not nearly as effective proper debugging. If there's something wrong with the way Dolphin emulates the DSP's HLE implementation for example, it's extremely helpful to see the exact contents of all the mail messages it uses to communicate with the CPU or all the commands it executes and when. Imagine coding an emulator, you make a mistake implementing something called a DMA (basically a fast way to copy memory from one place to another); wouldn't it be helpful to see what the DMA is doing step-by-step? That's the sort of thing Dolphin's debugger does. It lets you "peek" into the emulated hardware. CPU registers, current instructions, generated interrupts, current memory values; if you need to know about it to check if the emulator is running properly, you make it part of your emulator's debugger.

[pauldacheez]

>I guess DJBarry has a general idea of what debugging looks like in software in general

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