An integrated development and debugging environment for emulated architectures

2004-06 thru 2006-12

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This project is a GUI-based development environment for making homebrew programs and patches for Z80 based arcade hardware/games.

I figured that rather than using my overly complex Makefiles to work on these projects, then relying on MAME's debugger to try to get the projects to work, a completely integrated environment would be advantageous. You'd be able to directly browse and edit the RAM and ROM, and apply/remove patches while the game is running.

The current design consists of the following components (some modified):

• Emulation core: JAPE, a port of MAME to Java
• Hex Editor: jhecomponent
• Primary editor/IDE: A completely custom new app. Each file in its own window, borrowing the "sketchbook" type of organization idea from Processing, but using my LlamaGui engine probably.
• Assembler: Probably the existing asz80/z80 binaries
• IHX-ROM generation: A rewrite of my genroms project to take advantage of the JAPE CPU RAM/ROM buffers
• Debugger: since the version of MAME that JAPE is built on is pre-MAME-Debugger, i'll have to craft something together myself. I think it'll be more visual than what mamed offered