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From: johnm@spudge.UUCP (John Munsch)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc
Subject: Re: Soft-ICE, Anyone?
Message-ID: <736@spudge.UUCP>
Date: 18 May 89 14:39:58 GMT
References: <46500046@uxf.cso.uiuc.edu>
Reply-To: johnm@spudge.UUCP (John Munsch)
Organization: Friends of Guru Bob
Lines: 27

In article <46500046@uxf.cso.uiuc.edu> sac585@uxf.cso.uiuc.edu writes:
>
>Before me is an ad for a '386 software debugger called Soft-ICE from Nu-Mega
>Technologies. It claims to offer "all the speed and power of a hardware-
>assisted debugger at a software price." Has anyone used this debugger?
>Care to comment on its usefulness? Are there any other debuggers which make
>special use of the '386?

It is a good debugger in that it makes use of the 386's special debugging
features.  Unfortunately, the version that I last saw had no way to load a
symbol table or map file and that limited its usefullness too much for me
to want to use it.  It also had some problems coming up correctly when I
attempted to bring it up under an EGA program that I was attempting to debug.
The only feature that I saw that I really want in Turbo Debugger (the ONLY
debugger to talk about) was the ability it had to dump the memory chain so
that you could see what was where in memory.

They recommend using it to generate interrupt 3's (debugger interrupts) for
your current debugger (symdeb, codeview, etc.).  In this capacity it might be
a little better but I'm still not sold on it.  Instead, I've found that
Borland's Turbo Debugger is an excellent choice for me.  It has the ability
to debug remotely over a serial line, put itself entirely into extended memory,
and use some of the 386's debugging features through the loading of a special
device driver.  You might consider looking at Borland's product first and see
if it will do what you want.

John Munsch