Debugger

[casept]

I'm currently working on Steins;Gate and am at a point where I need to figure out what flags to set for exiting the title menu. This is rather tedious to accomplish by debug prints and manual cross-referencing with the disassembly, which is why I'd like to create an interactive debugger. I'd also like to integrate sc3ntist's disassembler, to display disassembly in the debugger.

Is this work something that you'd be willing to merge? I'm asking because the sc3ntist README states that it should eventually have a debugger (and this work would therefore belong there). However, IMO impacto is a more logical place for it, given that it already has a VM interpreter, GUI library etc.

[casept]

On taking a cursory look at sc3ntist's source, it seems like it actually has parts of a debugger, despite the README stating that it "doesn't actually debug anything yet". Is that statement still accurate? Or is the debugger actually usable, to the point where it'd make more sense to integrate impacto into sc3ntist for debug features rather than the other way round?

[MrRevo3D]

Hello @casept ! Having a debugger would definitely be very useful and would be much appreciated!
Unfortunately, I don't think any work on that was done in sc3ntist other than some very basic stuff that probably won't be useful. I also don't see the point in "integrating impacto into sc3ntist", it just doesn't really make any sense to me. impacto itself definitely feels like a lot more logical place for a debugger, and besides, I don't think adding Qt (sc3ntist) into the codebase would be any good. Using nuklear for the debugger UI would be perfect.

If you feel like you could take care of that it would be amazing! Thanks!

[casept]

I perhaps expressed my intent a bit poorly there - with "integration" I meant something like a bridge that would serialize VM state in impacto and send it to sc3ntist to display alongside the disassembly. Of course, if sc3ntist is dead anyways it doesn't really matter.

[drdaxxy]

The original intent behind sc3ntist was to build a remote debugging client for both impacto and the (patched) original engine. That work didn't stop because of technical roadblocks, I just lost interest. I still think this is a better approach than putting debugging UI into impacto, though.

the README stating that it "doesn't actually debug anything yet". Is that statement still accurate?

Yes.

[MrRevo3D]

Oh yeah, okay, I see that makes more sense now. And yeah, in that case I agree that making sc3ntist into a remote debugger is a better idea because of possible integration with original engine as well

[casept]

Alright, I'll take that route then.