MAMEWorld Forums - Programming - Re: Exception thrown in m6502 for Asteroids

This is a fair question. There are several reasons for MSVS over the normal workflow.

The main reason is for the debugger. Visual Studio just has such a superior debug interface. GCC is great, but unless I'm missing something, using GDB with some other IDE (Code, Eclipse, or whatever) just isn't so great. I would love to be corrected here!

I have some long-term ideas for adding features, mostly for my own use, but would happy to put them into the Open Source eventually. Specifically, I want to add some remote interrogation and controls via MQTT so another program, even another computer, can control a game with AI or other automation. (I know there have been others doing things leveraging the Lua interface, and maybe HTTP...)

There will be a lot of new code, including patches to MAME (hooks into an MQTT client, etc.), and standalone "controller" MQTT application which will likely be coded in C#. Again, I can be corrected here, but it seems to me to be a whole lot easier to use Visual Studio than GCC in the Mingw environment.

I really like Visual Studio Code and I have used it for all sorts of embedded (cross-compiler), Windows, and Linux with many flavors of GCC. My one major complaint is the debugger. For example, there is no memory viewer. So, you need to manually command-line GDB commands like it's 1990, rather than a modern feature-rich debugger that you should have. Eclipse may have a better debugger interface but it definitely own obnoxious hang-ups.

What IDE / debugger front-end are people using? The official documentation seems to stop at just getting the existing code compiled (not that I would expect more).

Thanks