One of the most confusing things you can do is select a bunch of
lines and apply a code start tag (nee "code hint"). We now ask for
confirmation when applying start/stop hints to multiple lines.
(issue #89)
Variables, types, and comments have been updated to reflect the new
naming scheme.
The project file serialization code is untouched, because the data
is output as serialized enumerated values. Adding a string conversion
layer didn't seem worthwhile.
No changes in behavior.
(issue #89)
Before:
Hint As Code Entry Point
Hint As Data Start
Hint As Inline Data
Remove Hints
After:
Tag Address As Code Start Point
Tag Address As Code Stop Point
Tag Bytes As Inline Data
Remove Analyzer Tags
The goal is to reduce confusion. The old nomenclature was causing
problems because it's inaccurate -- they're directives, not hints --
and made it look like you need to mark data items explicitly. The
new action names emphasize the idea that you should be tagging a
single address for start/stop, not blanketing a region.
This change updates the user interface, manual, and tutorials, but
does not change how the items are referred to in code, and does not
change how the program works.
(issue #89)
Created the "all ops" tests for W65C02. Filled in enough of the
necessary infrastructure to be able to create the project and
disassemble the file, though we're not yet handling the instructions
correctly.
Sometimes you just want to turn cycle counts on for a bit, and going
through app settings is tiresome. Now there's a toolbar checkbox
for it. The icon isn't ideal, but it'll do.
Consider:
LDA $00 loads a value from address $00
LDA $00,X might load from $00, or might not
LDA ($00),Y dereferences $00 as a 16-bit pointer
LDA ($00,X) dereferences a pointer, not necessarily from $00
When perusing the cross-reference list, it's useful to be able to
tell whether an instruction is accessing the location, using it as a
base address, or deferencing it as a pointer. We now show "ptr" in
the list for pointer dereferences. (We already showed "idx" for
indexed accesses.)
It's fairly common to want to Find something and then jump back to
where you were. The Find command now adds the current position to
the nav stack for the initial search. If you Find Next, the nav
stack is not altered.
This experimental feature applied platform symbols to the project,
setting labels where the platform symbol's address matched an internal
address. The feature now applies project symbols as well, and has
been renamed to "apply external symbols".
We now report the number of labels set.
Another chapter in the never-ending AppDomain security saga.
If a computer goes to sleep while SourceGen is running with a project
open, life gets confusing when the system wakes up. The keep-alive
timer fires and a ping is sent to the remote AppDomain, successfully.
At the same time, the lease expires on the remote side, and the objects
are discarded (apparently without bothering to query the ILease object).
This failure mode is 100% repeatable.
Since we can't prevent sandbox objects from disappearing, we have to
detect and recover from the problem. Fortunately we don't keep any
necessary state on the plugin side, so we can just tear the whole
thing down and recreate it.
The various methods in ScriptManager now do a "health check" before
making calls into the plugin AppDomain. If the ping attempt fails,
the AppDomain is "rebooted" by destroying it and creating a new one,
reloading all plugins that were in there before. The plugin binaries
*should* still be in the PluginDllCache directory since the ping failure
was due to objects being discarded, not AppDomain shutdown, and Windows
doesn't let you mess with files that hold executable code.
A new "reboot security sandbox" option has been added to the DEBUG
menu to facilitate testing.
The PluginManager's Ping() method gets called more often, but not to
the extent that performance will be affected.
This change also adds a finalizer to DisasmProject, since we're relying
on it to shut down the ScriptManager, and it's relying on callers to
invoke its cleanup function. The finalizer throws an assertion if the
cleanup function doesn't get called.
(Issue #82)
Changed "Use Keep-Alive Hack" to "Disable Keep-Alive Hack" to emphasize
that it defaults to enabled. Added a menu item for "Disable Security
Sandbox". Added a warning to both that tells the user that they must
reopen the current project for the change to take effect.
Note neither of these is persisted in app settings.
The old values were pretty optimistic in terms of the length of labels.
Short labels in all caps are very retro but sort of annoying to read,
so most disassemblies use longer ones. The new defaults are more
accommodating for the way labels are actually used.
The new name is more indicative of the purpose of the directory.
Updated the docs to point out that you can delete the contents any
time you want, so long as SourceGen isn't running at the time.
Also, change the default column widths for the exporter.
Don't allow comments to be set in the middle of an instruction or
multi-byte data item. The subsequent partial update confuses the
line list generator.
Change order of note/long-comment/comment to match display.
Expand SGEC to include long comments and notes. These are serialized
in JavaScript form.
SGEC now accepts addresses and relative position deltas. Exported
content uses addresses, and can be configured for deltas.
This is still an "experimental" feature, but it's getting expanded
a bit. The implementation now lives in its own class. An "export"
feature that generates SGEC data has been added. The file extension
has been changed from ".sgec" to ".txt" to make it simpler to edit
under Windows.
Added a "fake" assembler pseudo-op for DBR changes. Display entries
in line list.
Added entry to double-click handler so that you can double-click on
a PLB instruction operand to open the data bank editor.
Changed basic data item from an "extended enum" to a class, so we can
keep track of where things come from (useful for the display list).
Finished edit dialog. Added serialization to project file.
On the 65816, 16-bit data access instructions (e.g. LDA abs) are
expanded to 24 bits by merging in the Data Bank Register (B). The
value of the register is difficult to determine via static analysis,
so we need a way to annotate the disassembly with the correct value.
Without this, the mapping of address to file offset will sometimes
be incorrect.
This change adds the basic data structures and "fixup" function, a
functional but incomplete editor, and source for a new test case.
This was a relatively lightweight change to confirm the usefulness
of relocation data. The results were very positive.
The relatively superficial integration of the data into the data
analysis process causes some problems, e.g. the cross-reference table
entries show an offset because the code analyzer's computed operand
offset doesn't match the value of the label. The feature should be
considered experimental
The feature can be enabled or disabled with a project property. The
results were sufficiently useful and non-annoying to make the setting
enabled by default.
Two basic problems:
(1) cc65, being a one-pass assembler, can't tell if a forward-referenced
label is 16-bit or 24-bit. If the operand is potentially ambiguous,
such as "LDA label", we need to add an operand width disambiguator.
(The existing tests managed to only do backward references.)
(2) 64tass wants the labels on JMP/JSR absolute operands to have 24-bit
values that match the current program bank. This is the opposite of
cc65, which requires 16-bit values. We need to distinguish PBR vs.
DBR instructions (i.e. "LDA abs" vs. "JMP abs") and handle them
differently when formatting for "Common".
Merlin32 doesn't care, and ACME doesn't work at all, so neither of
those needed updating.
The 20052-branches-and-banks test was expanded to cover the problematic
cases.
Added generation of info/error messages to segment parser, which
are displayed in the main OMF viewer window.
Added segment viewer window, which opens when a segment entry in the
viewer list is double-clicked. Currently shows the "raw" header
fields, with place-holder UI for additional stuff.
If you double-click on the opcode of an instruction whose operand is
an address or equate, the selection jumps to that address. This
feature is now available in the Navigate menu, with the keyboard
shortcut Ctrl+J.
While testing the feature I noticed that the keyboard focus wasn't
following the selection, so if you jumped to an address and then
used the up/down arrows, you jumped back to the previous location.
(This was true when double-clicking an opcode to jump; it was just
less noticeable since the next action was likely mouse-based.) This
has been fixed by updating the ListView item focus when we jump to a
new location.
See also issue #63 and issue #72.
Sometimes it's useful to know whether an address referenced by a
function is a direct access, or is being used as a base address.
(I'm somewhat undecided on this one, since it clutters up the list
a bit. Giving it a try.)
If you double-click a project symbol declaration, the symbol editor
opens. I found that I was double-clicking on the comment field and
typing with the expectation that the comment would be updated, but
it was actually setting the initial focus to the label field.
With this change the symbol editor will focus the label, value, or
comment field based on which column was double-clicked.
The behavior for Actions > Edit Project Symbol and other paths to the
symbol editor are unchanged.
Also, disabled a wayward assert.
SourceGen Edit Commands is a feature that allows you to generate
commands into a file and have SourceGen apply them to the current
project. I'm not expecting this to be used by anyone but me, so
for now I'm just adding an entry to the debug menu that can read
comments out of a file.
Also, fixed a bug in the re-centering min/max code that prevented
it from working on trivial shapes.
Also, renamed the atari-avg visualizer to atari-avg-bz, with the
expectation that one day somebody might want to create a variant
for newer games.
Generation of HTML is extremely fast, but compressing thousands
of frames for wireframe animated GIFs can take a little while.
Sharing bitmaps between threads required two changes: (1) bitmaps
need to be "frozen" after being drawn; (2) you can't use Path because
BackgroundWorker isn't a STAThread. You can, however, use a
DrawingVisual / DrawingContext to do the rendering. Which is really
what I should have been doing all along; I just didn't know the
approach existed until I was forced to go looking for it.
Also, we now do a "run finalizers" call before generating an animated
GIF. Without it things explode after more than 10K GDI objects have
been allocated.
Added some more plumbing. Updated visualization set edit dialog,
which now does word-wrapping correctly in the buttons. Added Alt+V
as the hotkey for Create/Edit Visualization Set, which allows you
to double-tap it to leap into the visualization editor.
Experimented with Path drawing, which looks like it could do just
what we need.
Also, show the file size in KB in the code/data/junk breakdown at the
bottom of the window. (Technically it's KiB, but that looked funny.)
These were being overlooked because they didn't actually cause
anything to happen (a no-op .ORG sets the address to what it would
already have been). The assembly source generator works in a way
that causes them to be skipped, so everybody was happy.
This seemed like the sort of thing that was likely to cause problems
down the road, however, so we now split regions correctly when a
no-op .ORG is encountered. This affects the uncategorized data
analyzer and selection grouping.
This changed the behavior of the 2004-numeric-types test, which was
visibly weird in the UI but generated correct output.
Added the 2024-ui-edge-cases test to provide a place to exercise
edge cases when testing the UI by hand. It has some value for the
automated regression test, so it's included there.
Also, changed the AddressMapEntry objects to be immutable. This
is handy when passing lists of them around.
Double-clicking the opcode of an instruction that references a
local variable (e.g. "LDA ]foo") moves the selection to the line
that declares the variable. This wasn't working in the case where
the local var was annotated (e.g. "LDA ]foo?").
When a project is opened, the main window layout subtly changes.
Of particular note: the vertical splitters below the references and
symbols windows shift upward 1 pixel when a project is opened, and
back down a pixel when the project is closed. So if you close the
app while a project is open, the settings file gets updated with the
new values for the sliders. If you restart the app a lot the effect
becomes noticeably fairly quickly.
I'm not yet sure what's causing this. I'm currently working around
the issue by not updating the window sizes in the settings file if
they're off by only one pixel.
No meaningful change to the format itself, just to the way it's
formatted. Specifically, we now emit a line break after every
comma rather than only at curly braces.
The problem driving this change is that all end-of-line comments
are stored in a single dictionary, which becomes a single long line.
Most source control tools can't diff or merge that in a useful way.
Having every element on its own line makes some things harder to
read, but in the end I'm more interested in machine readability
than human readability.
(I tested this by saving all SGTestData projects and verifying that
they worked. I didn't check the updated versions in because it's
kind of nice to have older project files around to confirm that I'm
not breaking backward compatibility.)
The tool allows you to cut a piece out of a file by specifying an
offset and a length. A pair of hex dumps helps you verify that the
positions are correct.
Also, minor cleanups elsewhere.
Defined a simple monochrome bitmap format, and created some pieces
for a Tic-Tac-Toe game. Wrote a tutorial that explains how to
visualize them.
Also, updated some comments.
If you have a single line selected, Set Address adds a .ORG directive
that changes the addresses of all following data, until the next .ORG
directive is reached. Sometimes code will relocate part of itself,
and it's useful to be able to set the address at the end of the block
to what it would have been before the .ORG change.
If you have multiple lines selected, we now add the second .ORG to
the offset that follows the last selected line.
Also, fixed a bug in the Symbol value updater that wasn't handling
non-unique labels correctly.
Bitmap animations are composed of a sequence of other visualizations.
This is all well and good until a visualization is deleted, at which
point all animations in all sets in the entire project have to be
checked and potentially changed, and perhaps even removed (if all of
the animation's members have been removed). This turns out to be
kind of annoying to deal with, but it's better to deal with it in
code than force the user to manually update broken animations.
This change adds thumbnails for the animations, currently generated
by offscreen composition. This approach doesn't work quite right.
This adds a new class and a rough GUI for the editor. Animated
visualizations take a collection of bitmaps and display them in
sequence. (This will eventually become an animated GIF.)
Fixed the issue where changes to tags in the set currently being
edited weren't visible to the tag uniqueness check when editing other
items in the same set.
We now generate GIF images for visualizations and add inline
references to them in the HTML output.
Images are scaled using the HTML img properties. This works well
on some browsers, but others insist on "smooth" scaling that blurs
out the pixels. This may require a workaround.
An extra blank line is now added above visualizations. This helps
keep the image and data visually grouped.
The Apple II bitmap test project was updated to have a visualization
set with multiple images at the top of the file.
(1) Added an option to limit the number of bytes per line. This is
handy for things like bitmaps, where you might want to put (say) 3
or 8 bytes per line to reflect the structure.
(2) Added an application setting that determines whether the screen
listing shows Merlin/ACME dense hex (20edfd) or 64tass/cc65 hex bytes
($20,$ed,$fd). Made the setting part of the assembler-driven display
definitions. Updated 64tass+cc65 to use ".byte" as their dense hex
pseudo-op, and to use the updated formatter code. No changes to
regression test output.
(Changes were requested in issue #42.)
Also, added a resize gripper to the bottom-right corner of the main
window. (These seem to have generally fallen out of favor, but I
like having it there.)
- Show the full path in the tooltip for the two "recent project"
buttons shown on the launch panel.
- Reset the app title bar and status bar contents when the project
is closed.
Added comments, renamed files, removed cruft.
Stop showing the visualization tag name in the code list. It's
often redundant with the code label, and it's distracting. (We may
want to make this an option so you can Ctrl+F to find a tag.)
Various changes:
- Generally treat visualization sets like long comments and notes
when it comes to defining data region boundaries. (We were doing
this for selections; now we're also doing it for format-as-word
and in the data analyzer when scanning for strings/fill.)
- Clear the visualization cache when the address map is altered.
This is necessary for visualizers that dereference addresses.
- Read the Apple II screen image from a series of addresses rather
than a series of offsets. This allows it to work when the image
is contiguous in memory but split into chunks in the file.
- Put 1 pixel of padding around the images in the main code list,
so they don't blend into the background.
- Remember the last visualizer used, so we can re-use it the next
time the user selects "new".
- Move min-size hack from Loaded to ContentRendered, as it apparently
spoils CenterOwner placement.
