Home Computing Weekly


Bug

Categories: Review: Software
Publisher: No Man's Land
Machine: Oric 1/Oric Atmos

 
Published in Home Computing Weekly #93

This Oric utility program offers a fairly standard range of facilities for the machine language programmer. It is a monitor, with 19 commands, and debugger helps the programmer remove the bugs from his machine code program.

The monitor section allows filling areas of memory with selected bytes, searching for one or a string of bytes, displaying on the screen areas of memory, or comparing two areas of memory.

The debug is far more useful; it will allow register contents to be displayed and modified, up to 10 breakpoints can be set, and it will go through a machine code program stepwise, displaying the effect on registers. The step option will allow JSR to be implemented or ignored, depending on the user's wishes.

The program occupies 6K of RAM in the area normally reserved for Basic programs, so it is not possible to jump from a BASIC program to the monitor.

This is useful, but not essential for machine code programmers, offering a standard range of features.