Turbo debugger hardware enhancement

• Main Authors: Bautista, Arnel V., Boado, Andrea Sheila S., Hao, Jane Margret T., Yorobe, Giovanni V.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 1992
• Subjects: Debugging in computer science; Computer input-output equipment; Turbo (Computer program language); Electronic digital computers > Programming; Computer Sciences
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_bachelors/6955
• Institution: De La Salle University

Turbo Debugger is a stand-alone debugging tool that can be used with any program written in Pascal, C or assembly language. It provides tracing, single-stepping, viewing, inspecting, changing and watching capabilities. It also allows the use of hardware components to aid in breakpoint processing, and provides documentation for writing device drivers. The proposed system, the Turbo Debugger Hardware Enhancement (T.H.E.) consists of a hardware-debugging board and a device driver. It assists in the following types of break-point-setting: i) from the Breakpoints/Changed Memory Global command, ii) from the Condition/Changed Memory command, and iii) from the Condition/Hardware command of the Breakpoints Window local menu. The debugging card is divided into three types of modules: the address modules, the data modules, and the interrupt module. While the address modules process breakpoints with a specified address condition, and the data modules process breakpoints according to a specified data condition, the interrupt module is tasked to inform the device driver that a breakpoint needs processing. The device driver was coded according to specifications in the Turbo Debugger manual. It interfaces the T.H.E. device to the computer system. It entails the reading of memory blocks sent by Turbo Debugger through DOS and issuing calls to the respective procedures that process the request. T.H.E. allows Turbo Debugger to complement its software breakpoint capacity by adding hardware-assisted breakpoints, or real-time breakpoints. Aside from being more flexible and more powerful, the target program would be executed in full microprocessor speed instead of in single-step mode.