MAME debugger feature requests

[ScottTunstall]

Hi, I've been using the MAME debugger to reverse engineer scramble, galaxian, robotron 2084 and Berzerk.

I'm quite happy with it so far but have some feature requests for the debugger:

• A debugger FILLMEM command that can fill a region of memory with specified bytes/words/dwords/qwords, e.g.

fillmem 0,0xfff,0.b

Yes, just like memset in C.

• A copy and paste feature from the memory window. It would be great to be able to select a range of bytes from the memory window, right click and paste them into a document.

• When you left-click on, or hover over, a byte in the memory window, a tooltip showing its memory address would be nice. Its quite tedious manually counting bytes when trying to figure out an address.

• Adding a "dump in binary notation" command. When I discover a character set I find its easier for readers to view when the bytes are in binary notation. e.g. the data making the character "A" could be dumped as:

00111000
01000100
10000010
11111110
10000010
10000010
00000000

As you can see, this lets a reader spot the "A" with little effort.

Thanks,
Scott

[MooglyGuy]

I like these ideas, I'll champion 'em. I have a 3-week block of vacation from work coming up at the end of the week, so if you can bear with waiting a few days, I'll see what I can do to start looking into these items this weekend.

Since we have multiple debugger UI implementations depending on both the host OS and the command-line options (e.g., ImgUI versus OS-native implementations), please let me know what OS or debugger backend you're using so that I can prioritize it.

[ScottTunstall]

Hi Mooglyguy, thanks for taking this on. Much appreciated!

I'm using 64 bit version of MAME on Windows 10. Default MAME settings, no custom renderers etc.

There was one other feature I was thinking of but I think MAME might already have it - to be able to output to a port on Z80 hardware. When I use maincpu.mb@ or maincpu.pb@ it doesn't seem to write to the port. Memory mapped I/O works with 6809 and 6502 no problem. I was hoping to investigate the MAGIC RAM in Berzerk by writing to magicram_control_w port but no luck from command line,

Thanks again for your help!
Cheers,
Scott

[ajrhacker]

There was one other feature I was thinking of but I think MAME might already have it - to be able to output to a port on Z80 hardware. When I use maincpu.mb@ or maincpu.pb@ it doesn't seem to write to the port.

maincpu.ib@ is what you need here. You might also want to take note that maincpu.db@ will give access to the data space on Harvard architecture processors or other CPU devices that implement it for whatever reason.

[ScottTunstall]

Thanks, I knew I was missing it!

Regards,
Scott

[ajrhacker]

I too noticed the absence of a fill command. I'm working on adding one.

[cuavas]

• The fill command is present now: https://docs.mamedev.org/debugger/memory.html#debugger-command-fill
• You can right-click a window and copy the visible text to the clipboard