mhoes
Posts: 186
Joined: Wed Oct 26, 2016 12:26 pm

MAME internal debugger documentation

Hi,

Without any specific purpose or use case in mind whatsoever, and for my personal curiosity and informational purposes only, I was wondering if there is any documentation out there on how to use the MAME internal debugger, or on how/what it functions/covers/doesn't cover/does/doesn't do ?

I looked on the 'mamedev.org' website, and couldn't find anything there. Perhaps I have simply overlooked it, or looked in the wrong places ?
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Andrew Gardner
Posts: 14
Joined: Thu Nov 06, 2014 1:59 pm

Re: MAME internal debugger documentation

There really isn't much written on how to use the internal MAME debugger. It's one of those parts of MAME where, if an individual really needs it, there's a good chance they're some sort of programmer and the MAME source will tell him/her everything they need to know.

That being said, there is documentation for debugger functions accessible from within the debugger. Run the debugger, type 'help' at the prompt, and hit <ENTER>. This will print a few function names and a list of categories that you can type 'help [category]' and get further information. You can always type "help [functionName]" to get detailed information about how the function works and some examples of its use.

Happy hacking.
/Andrew
mhoes
Posts: 186
Joined: Wed Oct 26, 2016 12:26 pm

Re: MAME internal debugger documentation

Hi,

Thanks for the reply and the information, I guess that makes sense.

I did do some more googling though, and found this site 'letshackarcadegames.com' which seems to have a lot of information on the subject, including information on how to (start) using the debugger to reverse engineer a game. The last article in the series seems to be from September 2015 though, so I guess it's no longer updated.

Introducing the MAME Debugger
http://letshackarcadegames.com/?p=338

Thanks again for the help.
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Andrew Gardner
Posts: 14
Joined: Thu Nov 06, 2014 1:59 pm

Re: MAME internal debugger documentation

Good find! I didn't know about that site.

There was once a text file on how to emulate asteroids, but that fell so far out of date that it's only worth reading for the intuitions about arcade hardware - not so much about how to use the MAME debugger. The link you posted, however, is quite modern and pretty thorough.

Thanks for the info.
/Andrew

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