RE: [GD-Windows] SoftICE for debugging?

[Roland <ro...@wi...>]

I highly recommend running SoftICE on any development machine. It has
helped track down countless bugs. Most people in our team use a second
(monochrome) monitor on our development machines and have SoftICE's
output redirected there. I guess this setup would be helpful for
anybody developing fullscreen 3D stuff (apart from having two 'real'
monitors). Otherwise SoftICE's takes over the video memory and
displays its output in the middle of the graphics/Windows screen. I
don't know how reliable this would work in different/fullscreen 3D
video modes.

My favourite properties of SoftICE are:
* it catches *every* OutputDebugString(). I've seen the MSDev output
window 'drop' some debug output, if you output too much data. SoftICE
will slow down the application, but it will show every TRACE() call.
* You can download debug symbols and do Source Level debugging on
anything (not limited to drivers), watch local/global variables
(presented with correct type info), inspect memory etc. etc.
* You can catch almost any exception and once you've catched it, you
can do stack traces and single steps to pin down the problem.
* [driver developers only]: If you're into driver development, you can
debug drivers as soon as the machine loads them (even before you get
any UI).

Things that aren't that good:
* Some games will refuse to run, if you have SoftICE running
(copy-protection).
* If you have lot's of OutputDebugStrings() in some drivers, it will
severely slow down your machine (I had once a driver for a network
card which printed a line for every packet received -> unusable
because of this)
* It takes a bit of preparation before you can debug something inside
SoftICE's. It's not that quick Compile/Run/Breakpoint cycle you might
be used to from MSDev.

hope this helps
roland


> -----Original Message-----
> From: gam...@li...
> [mailto:gam...@li...]On
> Behalf Of
> Jon Watte
> Sent: Friday, November 09, 2001 3:03 PM
> To: Gamedevlists-Windows@Lists. Sourceforge. Net
> Subject: [GD-Windows] SoftICE for debugging?
>
>
>
> I'm having these problems with Windows 98 machines
> spuriously crashing
> once in a blue moon. Often, the machine is not reachable
> through the
> devices plugged in (keyboard, mouse, network card) so it
> looks like a
> hard "kernel hang". Of course, these are not repeatable,
> and will only
> happen on one machine out of 20 when running testing for
> three hours.
> Anything else would make it too easy :-)
>
> What kinds of tools have y'all had success with (or not) in this
> sitation? The product appears to run fine on Win2k/XP. I've
> been hearing
> about SoftICE but haven't used it personally (and haven't
> seen it used
> for the last three years or so). I believe it's a debugger
> used mostly
> for driver debugging, but would it allow me to examine
> machine state
> under these conditions?
>
> Anything else you can recommend?
>
> Cheers,
>
> 			/ h+
>
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