Is there an easy way to get the c64 debugger on the Chameleon V1 or V2? (i have both)

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Don't Panic. Please wash hands.

    This is the tool I use above all others. I have to use it directly from its own executeable, but its based on a branch of winvice which I know is in the TC carts.

    Can we put the debugger on there? Being able to work on the 64 and having access to this will be one of the most transforming eperiences I can imagine.


    Also, theres a bug when you drop a disk image and the fast copier starts up but its not very stable compared to the easyflash 3 which does the same thing (has the same feature) in which you drop a d64 file to the computer and it opens a fast copier and writes the full d64 to disk. The TC isn't stable on both v1 or V2 but its rock solid on the Easyflash3.


    But this is secondary to the debugger... I want to see that on the TC... It will be the first and likely most popular tool on there!


    Any help here guys?

    Quote from bytrapper

    based on a branch of winvice which I know is in the TC carts.

    No, you've got something wrong here: Chameleon is a VHDL implementation of our own research about the inner workings of the C64 chips. The language is a hardware description language, which is substantially different from the emulation that Vice is.


    Vice merely benefits from our research, as I'm allowing Tobias to spend iComp-paid time on the open-source project Vice. So yes, the two share knowledge, but no, Chameleon does not use Vice code in any way (note that the test suite and our adaption of it neither belongs to the Vice emulation core, nor to the Chameleon hardware core). However, if you've been following Vice in the past >10 years, you might have seen that most of the hardware-related leaps that the emulation has taken happened "in sync" with Chameleon. This is because we've put our results straight back into Vice.


    About that bug, please describe the exact steps you need to take to force an error, and the exact results that you're getting, along with a description of the results you're expecting. Your description sounds vague, and "unstable" might mean a ton of different things. Before I attempt to make sense of that, please take the time to describe it - then we can at least guess if the source is hardware- core- or software related.


    Jens

    It is vague and unstable, because the last time i used it with a real 64 was about 4 years ago... since then I've been using mostly c64 debugger, so i don't remember the exact steps I made to make it happen with the TC on real hardware, but I do remember the chameleon wasn't very stable with it and would get stuck halfway through and ran stutteringly, whereas the easyflash had the same option which was flawless so i tended to use that a lot to write d64's to real disk and used the inbuilt ar-mk5. It was disk copying software that started automatically on the 64 from the cartridge. Each time I'd want to turn a d64 into a real disk and I used the TC to write the disk, a software would popup on the 64.. it was so fast it was almost like a parallel disk copier. But it was buggy. I remember you could do the same thing with the EF3 and it always worked flawlessly. I didn't think a lot of it, but you may have already fixed it. I don't use the V2 much at all, I think its inferior to the V1, but I got the v1 when it first came out and I haven't upgraded it since. I haven't needed to, as i said, its been perfect!

    The only thing that really compares from the reviews ive read, is the other cart I have which I've never even plugged in. It has a Serial port to plug into the disk drive port on the rear of the machine and makes disk drive sounds I believe. Its called something(?) plus. I only really got it so I had it because people were talking about it more than the TC.
    Though I can honestly say I've NEVER taken it out of its box as the TC is the most ultimate cartridge I've ever used. Nothing really compares to to the TC in any way for features and expandability either.


    What you've done is incredible and I've honestly been shocked to see all the additional things that you've managed to pull off.


    You certainly deserve a pat on the back, no questions. This is a REALLY impressive piece of hardware man.

    And Im sorry, the emulation on the TC was so good as well as with complex timed demos, I thought it ran the vice core, so my mistake.


    But more importantly, is there a way to put the debugger onto the TC? Now thats a project that would get a lot of attention, especially being able to use it on a real64. C64debugger has REALLY changed the game.

    Quote from bytrapper

    You certainly deserve a pat on the back, no questions. This is a REALLY impressive piece of hardware man.

    Chameleon is not my own achievement - it's team effort of Peter, Tobias, me, and a lot of beta testers who deliver precise bug reports that let us create test cases for inclusion in an automated test suite.


    Quote from bytrapper

    But more importantly, is there a way to put the debugger onto the TC?

    There is memory access to the live machine through the USB port of Chameleon, but I believe there's a few features missing from the protocol, so a full debugger is probably not possible. I'll leave this for Tobias to answer - he has the afternoon/night shift for this forum, so that will take a few more hours.


    Jens

    Thanks Jens and to the rest of the team for delivering a product not only early, but incredibly well thought out and executed.

    Really impressive work!
    Have you seen the c64debugger? Its an incredibly handy tool!

    Quote

    There is memory access to the live machine through the USB port of Chameleon, but I believe there's a few features missing from the protocol, so a full debugger is probably not possible. I'll leave this for Tobias to answer - he has the afternoon/night shift for this forum, so that will take a few more hours.

    There are two main problems with this:

    a) We can't "see" the internal state of the I/O chips (in particular not the state of the real ICs in the C64)

    b) We can not stop the C64 (even if you stop the CPU - which is doable - all other ICs will keep running)


    Those things are trivial in an emulator implemented in software - but impossible with a C64. It could be done IF Chameleon would just be a standalone FPGA based emulator, with a lot of extra effort. However, we always aimed at having the exact same feature set in both cartridge and standalone mode (and the FPGA space is so full by now, such extra stuff is out of the question anyway).