RISC User December 1989

Does anybody have the disc that accompanied this magazine?

I’m interested in the annotated source of the single stepper to see how it works. The published version (available online) is comment free and rather compressed.

The code was originally published in September 1989, the December issue carries a fixed version.

Can you point me at the difficult version?

http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/pdfview/web/viewer.html?file=/downloads/26934 page 19 onwards.

Does anybody have the disc that accompanied this magazine?

Pretty sure the answer is yes, unfortunately Bedroom 4 is a total tip, and the RU stuff isn’t in the easy part.¹
Of course the “available on line” is I presume the wayback archive and the Nutshell CD is up there too https://archive.org/details/RISCUserinaNutshell

Wasn’t there a single stepping debug tool in one of the software libraries? APDL or something… That’s going to bug me now.

¹ Strange, because I thought I had all the CDs and discs in the rack by the door.

Cheers. Thankfully you can view inside iso files so don’t need to grab six hundred megs for a 15k file.

Original commented version:
https://archive.org/download/RISCUserinaNutshell/RISC%20User…%20in%20a%20Nutshell.iso/discs%2Fvol02%2F09.zip

And twiddle the ending to be 10.zip for the fixed one. Both cases Programs.Single (09) and Programs.Single2 (10).

Thanks, guys. :)

and wrapped up in an app shell – vol3 02

Must tidy the room, and probably take a bit of time to make ISOs of the CD library

Well it’s not going to work on StrongARM and later.

It’s a simple ARM simulator which peeks the instruction, groks the class and destination Regs, and copies it to RAM followed by MOV PC,R14 in order to execute it. The more difficult instructions – branches and PC-affecting ones – it emulates.

Small text window. Reads ReadC, acts on a few character codes. Can be driven over Serial or locally from VDU. Very small and simple. There’s a couple of bugs and it would need much SynchroniseCodeAreas on anything later than 1994 though.

If you’re after a step debugger for ARM3, you can download ARM_Debug from the Web archive. It might even be the “commercial” version of the code from RISC User. I don’t recall if it has source, but vaguely recall fixing a bug it in at some point.

It’s for understanding how those sorts of things do what they do.

for understanding

In that case, ARM Debug won’t be much use as although it works on StrongARM, there’s no source.

Having now checked, it was another step-debugger that I bug fixed. When I find it, I’ll let you know what it’s called.