MAMEDEV Forum

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 ?

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

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 The last article in the series seems to be from September 2015 though, so I guess it's no longer updated.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.

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There was once a text file on how to emulate asteroids, but that fell so far out of date that it's only worth reading for the intuitions about arcade hardware - not so much about how to use the MAME debugger.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