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"How did you debug applications on it? " With this bad boy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftICE
One of the first times I had to use a "modern" 32-bit debugger, one with its own top-level window on the normal desktop, I was trying to find a bug triggered by focus events. Every time I hit a breakpoint, the focus would change to the debugger, dropping another focus event into the event queue, which would naturally trigger the breakpoint again once I stopped single-stepping. Having the debugger embedded in the system you're trying to debug can be very, very annoying.
I loved having the debugger separated out onto its own screen, even if it was a monochrome screen showing a bunch of tiled windows drawn with CP437 text-mode characters. To this day I miss the perfection of that setup. One of the first times I had to use a "modern" 32-bit debugger, one with its own top-level window on the normal desktop, I was trying to find a bug triggered by focus events. Every time I hit a breakpo…
Sounds much more complicated than I remember it. I wrote a game called MVP Backgammon in 1991 using Borland C++ (5.x) and their integrated debugger, and do not recall any specific issues related to input queue deadlocks. You set up your PeekMessage loop or whatever and hung a breakpoint on the switch statement for the message type you needed to debug, and followed it down from there. I assume the debugger was smart e…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did you use OWL with BC++? That was so much better than MFC although the non-standard C++ extension was a little unsavory. I also remember the BC++ debugger being pretty nice although I preferred CodeView.
+1 for OWL. It was my first "real" C++ framework, and it was a great way to start. Borland had a nice tool suite but somehow just couldn't hang on to market share.
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I remember meeting some hackers at their house a friend of mine took me to in the middle of nowhere, and I asked them where they got their software cracks, and they kind of blinked, and showed me the first dual monitor setup I had ever seen in person, with a regular system on the left, and the output of SoftICE on the right. I guess before that I had just assumed lower level things were unknowable, but after that I s…
Was it the old VGA/Hercules combination? That was so badass It was also the only way to run dual-screen for a while, since it used a different memory region than colour displays. There was literally no way to run multiple colour adapters on the same computer at one point
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Did you use OWL with BC++? That was so much better than MFC although the non-standard C++ extension was a little unsavory. I also remember the BC++ debugger being pretty nice although I preferred CodeView.
+1 for OWL. It was my first "real" C++ framework, and it was a great way to start. Borland had a nice tool suite but somehow just couldn't hang on to market share.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Was it the old VGA/Hercules combination? That was so badass It was also the only way to run dual-screen for a while, since it used a different memory region than colour displays. There was literally no way to run multiple colour adapters on the same computer at one point
Talk about a blast from the past! Watcom C/C++ with external amber debugging display was the best.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
+1 for OWL. It was my first "real" C++ framework, and it was a great way to start. Borland had a nice tool suite but somehow just couldn't hang on to market share.
I loved Borland's tools. But they got Microsofted just like dozens of other apps, one by one over the years (word proc, spreadsheet, browser, etc.)
And Borland sure did their part. There were a number of great products they acquired and then destroyed. The Brief editor is a near and dear example for us developers, but they also went out of their way, it seems, to destroy dBase and the whole Ashton Tate thing. And Sidekick was a really cool app that they managed not to handle well, too.
I loved having the debugger separated out onto its own screen, even if it was a monochrome screen showing a bunch of tiled windows drawn with CP437 text-mode characters. To this day I miss the perfection of that setup. One of the first times I had to use a "modern" 32-bit debugger, one with its own top-level window on the normal desktop, I was trying to find a bug triggered by focus events. Every time I hit a breakpo…
You can still do remote debugging with WinDbg for example.