Re: writing a monitor


"Allan Adler" <spamtrap@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:y93prxe7r3f.fsf@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Matt <spamtrap@xxxxxxxxxx> writes:

Mike Gonta wrote:
Here is a real gem.
Seattle Computer Products 8086 Monitor version 1.4 2/18/80 by Tim
Paterson. Instruction manual and 8086 Monitor Assembly Listing
("This software is not copyrighted").
http://www.patersontech.com/Dos/Docs/Mon_86_1.4a.pdf

I spent years programming Z80 CPUs and 8085 CPUs on a processor which
had only write byte, read byte, step, and run instructions. It took 6
months to write a program that would now take me a couple of days to
write. I had to hard-code the instructions from assembler to hex by
hand. Fun, but slow :-)

That's something to look forward to. At the moment, I'm writing my
programs
from the comfort of RedHat Linux 7.3 on an ancient PC, assembling them
using the resident as86 and ld86 and using a C program to write them to
the boot sector and other sectors of a floppy. Then I have to reboot to
boot from the floppy. After the program runs, I have to reboot to Linux
to find out what got written to the floppy during the run of the boot
sector program, using dd and od to examine the floppy. These resources
will
still be available if I write or install a monitor, but it will be more
convenient to find out what the results are when a program runs and
perhaps to make slight modifications to it.

My question is, why don't you use Bochs?

If you already have written a C app to write the boot sector to the
floppy, you should be able to modify it to write to a floppy image
instead. Using Bochs, you won't have to reboot all the time, and
Bochs will return an error log, and it has a debugger that will
let you step through the code an instruction at a time.

http://bochs.sourceforge.net/

Ben

.

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