Mappy VM v0.7b

posted in Utility Release by swampgas on Jul 4th, 2001

Joat wrote in about a new release of his GBA debugging environment tool, Mappy VM. Lots of new features and fixes:
  • Uses the BIOS image (there is a stub included that has only IRQ support) for all SWI calls.
  • Console which displays the current status of the VM and has a prompt similar to the DOS prompt (more features and commands to come)
  • CPU status viewer which allows inspection of the current CPU register contents
  • Fully featured disassembler with multiple easy to use breakpoints (just click on the margin of the address where you want to trap), and the ability to either follow the PC or disassemble in either thumb or ARM as the user wishes.
  • Hyperlinks in the disassembler, clicking on an address will take you to that address
  • Scripted disassembley exporter, which comes with 3 templates for normal and multiboot images, and the BIOS
  • I/O register viewer, with descriptions and access modes for each register, and a user selectable naming scheme
  • Memory Viewer, with a seperate color code for mirrors of memory banks
  • Palette Viewer, with import and export palette options
  • A binary image info dialog, which displays the header and checks it for accuracy
  • Screenshot capture to clipboard or a file
  • Many CPU flow controls: Run, single cycle step, single frame step, n cycle step, n frame step, and reset.
  • Correctly handles the quirky blending system (where only the first 2 blend layers are used)
  • Correctly handles memory access widths
  • Completly implements memory wait states
  • User defined key bindings from the tools menu
  • Import and export of binary data into memory via the memory viewer
  • Saving sprite images to a file via the sprite viewer
  • Saving selected layers to a file via the screen viewer
  • Transfer to hardware tool, with a user defined transfer script
  • Debug logging to the console, with user choosen events to log (configured in the settings panel)
  • A header patching tool built into the program (you must supply a source binary file with the header to copy from however)
  • A screen viewer, which allows the user to alter the display CR and rerender, to get a better idea of what is happening or see what has gone wrong.
  • A C/C++ syntax highlighting source code viewer (in the future, this will be used for source level debugging)
  • A sprite viewer which displays all of the attributes of a sprite
  • Movie capture mode, which allows a pixel-perfect sequence of frames to be captured, at a much higher quality than a wideboy could provide.
  • A complete VRAM viewer and examiner, allowing display of any part of VRAM as either a text or rot/scale map, tiles, sprite tiles, or as a frame buffer
  • Support for all DMA channels (0..3)
  • Support for all timers (0..3)
  • Interrupt support (V-Blank, H-Blank, Y-trigger, DMA completion, timer overflow)
  • Loading ROM images from 256 bytes to 32 MBytes in size
  • Loading multiboot images from 256 bytes to 64 KBytes in size
  • Loading and flattening .ELF files as a ROM (in the future, this will allow source level debugging)
  • 4-kbit EEPROM on cartrdige
  • 64-kbyte JEDEC Flash ROM on cartridge (incomplete)
  • 64-kbyte SRAM on cartridge
  • Loading a BIOS image up to 16 KBytes in size
  • Partial help file
  • SDK documentation
  • Complete thumb and ARM opcode emulation (the ARM core has not been completly perfected yet)
  • All video modes supported (0..5)
  • All blend effects supported in all modes and situations (fade towards white and black, alpha blending)
  • All windows supported (including sprite windows)
  • All sprite types and effects supported (including mosaic and blending)
 Download from the GBA Utils.