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Great Milenko
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Debugging with out dual monitors
Started by , Aug 22 1999 08:02 PM
6 replies to this topic
#1 Guests - Reputation: 0
Posted 22 August 1999 - 08:02 PM
ok I'm writing a game in DX. I can't get the game to work with the debugger in VC++(5.0) and I can't find an MDA monitor and card anywere. how can I debug the game? right now I'm just reading the code and guessing changing the code then running it... its slow and painful...
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#2 Members - Reputation: 151
Posted 28 July 1999 - 05:39 PM
One way to do it is to alter your application so that it renders to a window, not fullscreen. To do this you just have to alter your DirectDraw Initialization and Flipping Routines. Also make sure that you have DDLOCK_NOSYSLOCK as one of the flags if you are locking surfaces.
Kevin.
#3 Anonymous Poster_Anonymous Poster_* Guests - Reputation:
Posted 11 August 1999 - 11:09 AM
another way to do it, assuming you're debugging your game logic and not something DX related, is like this:
//this should be visible every where you are //doing anything with DX
#define DEBUG_GUTS
...
#ifndef DEBUG_GUTS
//DX stuff goes here
#endif
this is called conditional compilation in case you didn't know.
#4 Members - Reputation: 122
Posted 11 August 1999 - 04:25 PM
I had the exact same problem. I tried the muti monitor setup with no luck. I also tried the network debug..way too slow. I ended up creating a debug file log class. I use this class as a private member of all my other classes. This way I can have a different log for every class. When ever a degug message is logged the class opens the file, appends the info and closes the file. I had to do it this way because if the program crashes while the file is still open all the data that was written since the file was last opened will be lost.
#5 Members - Reputation: 157
Posted 11 August 1999 - 05:11 PM
Here's a crazy idea....
if you're up for it and you have to equipment (your main computer, and an old cheezy one with a modem). What you do is write a simple modem library that just spits chars into the modem. So whenever you want a debug message you go
DebugPrintf("hickle!");
and it'll display "hickle" on the other computer.
It shouldn't be too hard to write the modem library since you won't need dx or win32 (use dos functions). I remember writing a modem lib, that did simple data transfer, in a day or so, way back then when I was working on Ping!
owell, just a thought... 
#6 Members - Reputation: 1102
Posted 22 August 1999 - 06:29 PM
Remote debugging with Visual C++ 6.0 is several times faster than 5.0, you might want to try that.
http://members.xoom.com/mutex0
http://members.xoom.com/mutex0
#7 Members - Reputation: 122
Posted 22 August 1999 - 08:02 PM
I also have great problems with debugging my DX apps/games. Especially when the bug is somewhere in the fullscreen setup code. And because i just can't figure out how to do remote debugging with BC5.4 i have begun creating a network debugging class wich can be used to create both a logfile and to remotley monitor difrent kinds of values/strings in real-time. And to remotley show new debug-log entries as they happen.
If you think this might be interesting then please, contact me.
