Friday, 17 July 2020

Updated m65dbg tool

One of our volunteers, Gurce, has been working on improving some of the tools we have been building for making development on the MEGA65 easier.


New and improved "m65dbg" tool

In short: the m65dbg tool has now integrated facilities provided by the m65 and mega65_ftp tools.

What are all these tools?

  • m65dbg is a tool I wrote to enhance the remote-debugging experience for the mega65. It builds upon the serial monitor that the MEGA65 provides at the hardware-level.
    If you are not already familiar with the idea of the m65dbg programme,  the following video from a while back walks through its facilities, and how it compares to the serial monitor. But skip down if you would like to know what's new.
     
  • The m65 tool is more of a swiss-army knife Paul has been working on, also making use of the serial monitor under the hood, with nice, unique facilities being added from time to time. My 2 favourite facilities within it are:
    • take a 'screen-shot' of the screen (saved as either ascii or .png)
    • 'remote keyboard' mechanism (letting you remotely type on your mega65 via your pc)
       
  • mega65_ftp is a nice tool to upload/download files directly to/from the sd-card plugged into your mega65, again using the serial monitor under the hood.

 

Why integrate them?

While I was enjoying all of these facilities during my debugging forays, I was tiring of chopping and changing between them. I felt the debugging experience would be enhanced further if all these facilities could be found in one place.

 

Can I see a demonstration of the new m65dbg tool in action?

Yep sure, made a short video of the new facilities in the following video:


 

Ok, I'm sold! Where do I get my hands on this lovely tool?

Right now, it's solely available as source-code on github here:

Happy debugging to you!

Note from Paul: We hope to move all of these tools into the https://github.com/MEGA65/mega65-tools repository over coming weeks, so that there is a one-stop shop for when you want to get started with developing for the MEGA65.



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