See my early work: X-Debug from 1992

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I recently discovered a floppy containing the source to a program I wrote in 1992: X-Debug, a debugger for the Atari ST. Coincidentally I also received an email via this blog from someone asking if I had the source and rights to the Atari version of HiSoft Devpac, which I wrote in the late-80s. I couldn't help with Devpac, but I have posted the full source to X-Debug on my personal site.

Its interesting to look at my code from way back then: it was mostly in C, which a bit of assembler for the low-level stuff (screen access, MMU hackery, debugger hooks). Apart from the formatting, and the fact it is C and not C++, it's not too bad, though I say so myself.

Somewhere I have a 10M (yes thats megabyte) SCSI hard-drive that contains everything I did for the Atari. If I could find it, and if it still works, I could dig up some more old stuff from this period of my life, as it is FAT-formatted so a PC should read it. I even have an Atari ST emulator somewhere so I guess I could even run the stuff on my PC too.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    August 31, 2006
    David,

    Thank you for this!

    BTW: You shouldn't have said the bit about the old hard drive :) Anway, if you ever find it and want some help accessing it please do not hesitate to contact me!

    Best regards and again thanks a lot,
    George
  • Anonymous
    August 31, 2006
    That'll have been the last version of DevPac I ever used - I used the Spectrum version as well. Didn't HiSoft do a C compiler for the Spectrum - I seem to remember using that as well - possibly not quite the compilation times I'm used to now...

    The 10M thing is scary as well - I look at the .pch file and I'd be doing well to get one of those on a 10M disk!
  • Anonymous
    August 31, 2006
    Very cool!  I still use Devpac.  It's nice to see old source code released.  Hope you find the old HD.  ;o)

    Thanks for donating the source to the Atari community, it's a very nice gesture.
  • Anonymous
    September 01, 2006
    The comment has been removed
  • Anonymous
    September 01, 2006
    I forgot to say: to actually build X-Debug you'll need Lattice C and a version of GenST that can do 680x0 instructions. The makefile and scripts in the zip are for a Unix-ish shell I used to use, whose name escapes me but it was Scandinavian.

    Stuart: yes, HiSoft did a C compiler for the Spectrum. I didn't work on any of their Spectrum stuff, I was just a customer of those. I helped them add Microdrive support to their tools one summer, and then they hired me to do the 680x0 stuff (on the QL originally).
  • Anonymous
    September 07, 2006
    That is funny, for the last 20 years I assumed you wrote all HiSoft's stuff.
  • Anonymous
    September 12, 2006
    Thanks Rob! Way to make me feel real old...