Wow. DEBUG.EXE is being finally phased out in Windows 7. I can't believe it was still there.
This brings me back two different memories. I had used this program in the past (a long while ago!) and it caused me both pain and joy.
Regarding pain: I had an MS-DOS 5.x book that spent a whole section on DEBUG.EXE, and one of the examples in it contained a command that caused the program in memory to be written to some specific sectors of the floppy disk. Guess what I tried? I executed that same command but told it to use my hard disk instead of the floppy drive. Result: a corrupted file system. Had to run scandisk (remember it?), which marked some sectors as faulty and I thought I had ruined my precious 125MB WD Caviar hard disk. It wasn't until much, much, much later that I learnt that such a thing was not possible, and that really formatting the disk with a tool that had no memory of "bad" sectors (aka, Linux's newfs) could revert the disk to a clean state. (Actually, I kept that hard disk until very recently.)
Regarding joy: On a boring weekend away from home, I used DEBUG.EXE on an old portable machine without internet connection to hack a version of PacMan. I disassembled the code until I found where it kept track of the player's lives and tweaked the counter to be infinite (or extra large, can't remember). That was fun. I could get to levels me and my father (who used to be an avid player) had never seen before!
It's a pity this tool is going, but it must go. It is way too outdated compared to current debuggers. I wonder if anyone is still using it.
Saturday, May 09, 2009
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4 comments:
Oh noooooooooooo!
*cries*
It was such a superb tool to debug
stuff, easier to use than gdb, and
while not as fancy as Borland’s
Turbo Debugger 1.0, one could write
AND SAVE modifications or entire
programmes in it.
And I used it excessively in debugging
the MirBSD MBR, PBR (bootxx), boot-
loader (boot / ldbsd.com) early sy-
stem startup.
Someone whose father used to be an avid player of PacMan? Way to make me feel old, dude....
so that was it, hmm i have just finished installing w7. and im back to work, i use debug on my classes, but now, guess ill have to pull up a virtual os on top of my w7 just to be able to use it
I concur it must go, it was very limited...in that it couldn't do 32 bit registers, not to mention 64 bit ones we currently enjoy. But, as you say, it was great for "debugging" programs of interest. I still use it on my XP machine to test ASM code...but then again, I'm a nerd who still writes code in ASM. :-)
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