Mac Emulator with Debugger

Discuss emulation of the Nintendo Entertainment System and Famicom.

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zeroone
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Re: Help me Diagnose my PPU Problem & Mac Emulator with Debu

Post by zeroone »

davecom wrote:what is the best Mac NES emulator with a debugger? It seems like the emulators with good debuggers are Windows/Linux only. What do the Mac users here use? I see old forum threads, but I'm wondering what's in vogue as of 2018 on the Mac.
Give Nintaco a try.
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Banshaku
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Re: Help me Diagnose my PPU Problem & Mac Emulator with Debu

Post by Banshaku »

@Koitsu,

I don't really care which name they use, for me OS X is the OS for the Mac, that the only part I need to know. As for talking regarding apple, this can be done in another thread instead of derailing this one :)

For the code, I was close! That was the other one I found but since I did only a quick 10 minutes search and didn't know about icon per model, I just went with a guess. Thanks for the history class, love those thing!

@Davecom

Mesen for now doesn't work with Mono 5 installed from brew. Will continue to test (and update the mesen thread).

Edit:

I should have known, Tepples created a topic for the naming "issue" :lol:
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davecom
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Re: Help me Diagnose my PPU Problem & Mac Emulator with Debu

Post by davecom »

I guess the reason you should care that it's "macOS" and not "OS X" nor anything else is for consistency (it looks better) and so that future readers of the Wiki know what they're looking at. It's very possible young readers of the Wiki in a couple years will not know what "OS X" means. "macOS" is the official name and therefore probably what should be used. I'm happy to do a find and replace to fix it on the emulator page but after I created an account I found "You do not have permission to edit pages in the Page namespace."
koitsu wrote:My point was that a classic Mac user (read: from the 80s) would know how silly it would be to hem and haw over "Mac OS" (with a space) vs. "OS X" vs. "macOS", and thus, arguing capitalisation and spacing semantics (esp. when most of those emulators were probably from 2016, which during late of was when Apple marketing decided to switch from "OS X" to "macOS") was sad -- hence, sad Mac. If a person says "OS X" we know what they mean, if they say "MacOS" when talking about present-day software/Macs, we know what they mean; the pedantry isn't necessary but is funny (to me) since Apple is effectively going back to the original name (sans a space and capitalisation -- again, who cares?) as their System 1 through 9 software. ;-)

Super off-topic as mentioned: as for the crash codes shown: it depends on the model of ("classic") Mac, and *when* the crash/issue happens. I remember that 0x0F meant an exception error, and that the remaining part of the code (or the code on the 2nd line) represented a detail/state code that was more indicative. I had to do some digging, but here you go. From that you should be able to discern that the Mac depicted is probably a Mac SE or Mac II indicating code 0x0000000F (exception error), subcode 0x0000000D (SCC failure; SCC = Zilog SIO (serial controller) used for controlling the serial ports). SCC isn't a new term to me, since the smae chip is on the IIGS (an 8530) -- and I sure hope I'd be familiar with it, considering I wrote a IIGS CDA back in the early 90s called QuickPort II that allowed setting the serial port >19200bps, haha. :D
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koitsu
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Re: Help me Diagnose my PPU Problem & Mac Emulator with Debu

Post by koitsu »

davecom wrote:I guess the reason you should care that it's "macOS" and not "OS X" nor anything else is for consistency (it looks better) and so that future readers of the Wiki know what they're looking at. It's very possible young readers of the Wiki in a couple years will not know what "OS X" means. "macOS" is the official name and therefore probably what should be used. I'm happy to do a find and replace to fix it on the emulator page but after I created an account I found "You do not have permission to edit pages in the Page namespace."
Not all the emulators on there are known to work with newer versions of Apple's operating system, i.e. some may only work on older versions of OS X. What's even worse (and may surprise you) is that a lot of software of that sort doesn't list off the system requirements anywhere in GitHub or in documentation, it just says nebulously "works on OS X" (which as well all know, isn't always true; what worked in 10.10.x might not work in 10.13.x). It would make the most sense to list off what exact OS version is supported, but as said, it's not always denoted in the program's documentation (if any). So saying "macOS" by itself is still kinda vague, if the argument is "future readers may not know what OS X is/was", but you have a good point. I wish software authors were better about their documentation :\

Wiki admins have to grant you access to do edits. It's part of the process, as it ensures that bots (or nefarious people) can't edit the pages with junk or spam, which used to happen constantly. I've marked your account as a "confirmed user" which should allow you to edit pages.
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davecom
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Re: Help me Diagnose my PPU Problem & Mac Emulator with Debu

Post by davecom »

koitsu wrote:
davecom wrote:I guess the reason you should care that it's "macOS" and not "OS X" nor anything else is for consistency (it looks better) and so that future readers of the Wiki know what they're looking at. It's very possible young readers of the Wiki in a couple years will not know what "OS X" means. "macOS" is the official name and therefore probably what should be used. I'm happy to do a find and replace to fix it on the emulator page but after I created an account I found "You do not have permission to edit pages in the Page namespace."
Not all the emulators on there are known to work with newer versions of Apple's operating system, i.e. some may only work on older versions of OS X. What's even worse (and may surprise you) is that a lot of software of that sort doesn't list off the system requirements anywhere in GitHub or in documentation, it just says nebulously "works on OS X" (which as well all know, isn't always true; what worked in 10.10.x might not work in 10.13.x). It would make the most sense to list off what exact OS version is supported, but as said, it's not always denoted in the program's documentation (if any). So saying "macOS" by itself is still kinda vague, if the argument is "future readers may not know what OS X is/was", but you have a good point. I wish software authors were better about their documentation :\

Wiki admins have to grant you access to do edits. It's part of the process, as it ensures that bots (or nefarious people) can't edit the pages with junk or spam, which used to happen constantly. I've marked your account as a "confirmed user" which should allow you to edit pages.
Thanks for the access, and I understand your argument about old versions but for consistency I would suggest making them all macOS. I will for now just update the ones we know work under the latest version to be macOS, but really it is probably not helpful to use multiple names on the same page.
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davecom
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Re: Help me Diagnose my PPU Problem & Mac Emulator with Debu

Post by davecom »

zeroone wrote:
davecom wrote:what is the best Mac NES emulator with a debugger? It seems like the emulators with good debuggers are Windows/Linux only. What do the Mac users here use? I see old forum threads, but I'm wondering what's in vogue as of 2018 on the Mac.
Give Nintaco a try.
Thanks, yeah I'd tried Nintaco before and wasn't in love with its UI, but it's probably the best we've got.
calima
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Re: Mac Emulator with Debugger

Post by calima »

Mednafen seems to run on macs too.
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zeroone
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Re: Help me Diagnose my PPU Problem & Mac Emulator with Debu

Post by zeroone »

davecom wrote:Thanks, yeah I'd tried Nintaco before and wasn't in love with its UI, but it's probably the best we've got.
What features are you looking for?
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davecom
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Re: Help me Diagnose my PPU Problem & Mac Emulator with Debu

Post by davecom »

zeroone wrote:
davecom wrote:Thanks, yeah I'd tried Nintaco before and wasn't in love with its UI, but it's probably the best we've got.
What features are you looking for?
Like I said, a nice UI :) but seriously Nintaco seems to have most of the features I will need. Specifically it shows PPU registers as you step which is where I think my current problem lies.
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davecom
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Re: Mac Emulator with Debugger

Post by davecom »

calima wrote:Mednafen seems to run on macs too.
Can you point to the location of Mac builds? I don't see any on the official website.
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Banshaku
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Re: Mac Emulator with Debugger

Post by Banshaku »

Since it is a command line based emulator, you should be able to install it with brew.

For the wiki, if you could find the information about the macOS emulators and see on which version of the OS they can be run that would really be of great help for the wiki. This would help future users. I had the same issues when I did some programming with a Mac but since I came from a windows background and knew about the one with debuggers, I just figured out it was faster to just run them under wine. A good native emulator for mac with a debugger would be nice to have, especially performance and UI wise.
dienben2020
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Re: Mac Emulator with Debugger

Post by dienben2020 »

Hello,

I've found Maciform and fork it in order to run on the latest macOS (Catalina).

Please find the git repository: https://github.com/Dienben/macifom

You will find a release directory with the latest build included.

There is a debugger in it and I'm trying to find a way to use it :D

Regards,

Ben
Mjbudd77
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Re: Mac Emulator with Debugger

Post by Mjbudd77 »

The latest beta version of Fceux's SDL based emulator was recently ported to Qt. This runs natively in both mac and Linux OSs. This new version contains most of the debug tools that previously were only part of the windows port including the breakpoint debugger.
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