CodeView: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 02:10, 14 October 2010

Revision as of 02:11, 14 October 2010

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* Register window - to visualize the 80x86 register contents, including segments, flags and the FPU (CodeView existed before MMX and other SIMD extensions).

* Output window - a window showing startup operations and debugging information relating to breakpoints, hardware breaks (interrupt 0 and 3), etc.

* 386 mode - CodeView supported 8086, 80286 and 80386 and later processors. 386 enhanced mode was activated by a menu option, allowing for 32-bit registers and disassembly displays.

* Monochrome monitor support - CodViewCodeView supported debugging on either a single color (CGA, EGA or VGA) monitor with page/memory swapping between the user application and the CodeView screen, or through a feature which utilized a separate monochrome monitor. The monochrome monitor existed in memory address space 0xb0000, while the color monitor existed at 0xb8000 for text and 0xa0000 for graphics. Use of the monochrome monitor with its separate memory address space allowed debugging graphics applications without affecting the display, as well as all text modes. Monochrome monitor support was limited to 25 lines, whereas color monitors could utilize 25, 43 or 50 line mode, allowing for more information on the screen at the same time.

Creating symbolic debugging output, which allowed memory locations to be viewed by their programmer-assigned name, along with a program database showing the source code line related to every computer instruction in the binary executable, was provided for by the command line switch -Zi given to the compiler, and -CO given to the linker. Variants like -Zs and -Zd provided lesser information, and smaller output files which, during the early 1990s, were important due to limited machine resources, such as memory and hard disk capacity. Many systems in those days had 8MB of memory or less.