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Comment by qingcharles | Hacker News Reader

Ah, the joys of trying to come up with creative ways to get feedback from your code when literally nothing is available. Can I make the beeper beep in morse code? Can I just put a variable delay in the code and time it with a stopwatch to know which value was returned from that function? Ughh.

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Some of us have worked on embedded systems or board bringup. Scope and logic analyzer ... Serial port a luxury.

IIRC Windows has good support for debugging device drivers via the serial port. Overall the tooling for dealing with device drivers in windows is not bad including some special purpose static analysis tool and some pretty good testing.

This is why power users want that standard old two digit '7 segment' display to show off that ONE hex code the BIOS writes to at various steps...

When stuff breaks, not if, WHEN it breaks, this at least gives a fighting chance at isolating the issue.

Yeah. Been there, done that. Write to an unused address decode to trigger the logic analyzer when I got to a specific point in the code, so I could scroll back through the address bus and figure out what the program counter had done for me to get to that piece of code.

Old school guys at my first job could send the contents of the program counter to the speaker, and diagnose problems by the sound of it.

Definitely Old School Cool

I call this "throwing dye in the water".

I certainly used beeping for debugging more than once! : - )

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