BitMagic - The X16 Development Suite!

[Yazwho]

Bit Magic

BitMagic is a project the aim of which is to create a single Commander X16 Development Suite using VSCode.

It is comprised of four parts:

- Template Engine
- Compiler
- Debugger
- Emulator

Generally you'll want to start with either the Debugger or the Emulators, so please follow those links for more information!

Please note, this is not an 'official' application that is endorsed by the Commander X16 team.

It is also a work in progress, for development you may find the Official Emulator or Box16 a better choice.

Debugging the kernel using VSCode:

DebuggerExample.png (330.1 KiB) Viewed 17596 times

[Johan Kårlin]

Wow, very interesting project. I will eagerly follow the development of this.

[Yazwho]

The debugger is now available on the VSCode extensions marketplace.

Just search for `bitmagic` and click install!

Please note, only Windows is supported.

For more information please check the extension's page, which has links to the documentation.

Both the debugger, emulator and extension are still a work in progress, so the same caveats still apply in that the official emu or Box16 might be better choices!

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[danboid]

Seeing as VS Code has (ar least) Linux and macOS ports can you please explain why this is Windows only? Do you plan to support other platforms, or at least Linux VS Code?

[Yazwho]

The debugger\emulator core is written in x64 assembler, so it will only run on that architecture.

This core is then wrapped in a C# application, which handles everything else. While this may well run on x64 machine running Linux, I do not have such a machine so I cannot test it. I would never release something untested, so that precludes a Linux version.

All the code is available, so if you want to compile it on a Linux box and give it a go, I'd be interested to hear if you can get it to work.

[Yazwho]

The standalone emulator now has an installer, and is available from:
https://github.com/Yazwh0/BitMagic/rele ... ESetup.msi

Sadly no auto-updater yet. Was going to use the Windows Store or similar, but I dont want to pay for a certificate to sign the installer so will have to figure something else out.

[Yazwho]

Expressions have been updated both in the debugger and the compiler, so you can now use the `<`, `>` and `^` both as unary operators and their normal equivalent.

for example both of these are now valid:

> 0x1234 1 > 2 ? > 0xabcd : > 0x1234

Both returning 0x34 as you'd expect. You can also use $ to denote a hex value, instead of 0x.

(The old way of pasting in html code was much nicer for examples...)

[Yazwho]

Added some documentation for Watches and Breakpoints.

Log Point example

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[Yazwho]

Seeing as VS Code has (ar least) Linux and macOS ports can you please explain why this is Windows only? Do you plan to support other platforms, or at least Linux VS Code?

Now works with Linux!

Just install the extension from VSCode and away you go.

linux.gif (1.31 MiB) Viewed 17007 times