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Comment by hackyhacky | Hacker News Reader

The domain name reminds me of the venerable DOS "debug.com" command, which managed to combine an interactive and scriptable debugger, assembler, and disassembler into a program weighing a few kilobytes. I spent many long hours in my youth using it to reverse engineering copy protection on games. I really wish we had a similar tool for the modern era.

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    The DEBUG utility was originally named DEBUG.COM in early versions
    of MS-DOS, but it was renamed to DEBUG.EXE starting with MS-DOS 3.2

Shoutout to the 12 of us who remember debug> g=c800:5

Sure I remember, but since I purchased Spinrite doing lowlevel was needed just once while changing ST-506 controller to a different type or for a new disk, former was quite much rarer needed.

Then even after std lowlevel it was worth using Spinrite to check if interleave value was proper. And if it wasn't it was worth letting it first before anything else. Same when changing a faster CPU as it could speed up IO so much that no interleave would not needed any more and get faster IO.

Spinrite was such a great tool and time saver fixing or making preventive periodic maintenance to customers disks, even though it chugged hours even 30M disks. And just because not to take absolutely any risk it was necessary to make full backup first, which that took quote long also. LapLink was a great tool for that, before LAN became more common.

Sigh. How the times change. Right now I'm looking at 2 days to rebuild my NAS array after adding another 10TB disk.

True, that's some things have changed.

But it's when you consider taking first full drive backup times. It still takes 'forever' when you'd rather like to get on with fixing single disk issues. Or like when you wait RAID rebuilds too.

We did plan our maintenance tasks so, that there was something else useful we could do while obligatory backup and Spinrite was running. Upgraded another devices EPROM's, PC BIOS or dot matrix printer EPROM, cleaned printer heads, chaff and dust from chassis, changed colour ribbon to it. Ran updates to software we had sold etc. And went lunch with the customer:)

It turned into 5 days. After realising I'd forgotten to change the block size to 4096 and it was horribly slow, I yanked the drive out, tried with my utility to set it to 4096 bytes and failed, found another utility that did the job, put the drive back in, wait 3 days for it to rebuild the array without the new disk, and then another two days to add the disk back in. Sigh.

Still, with 4k block sizes, it goes like shit off a shovel.

I had Spinrite III; Gibson made good stuff. But I was often in situations where all I had was a WD, etc MFM controller.

I'm glad I wasn't the only one who immediately thought of this.

And yes, some of us are either old enough that we remember DEBUG.COM, or we got started way too young.

Oh wow. I remember doing this as well... with little to no success.

The debug.com binary only showed one measly ASM instruction at a time as I recall. Shudder.

Just type u and strike Enter

WinDbg?

WinDbg is a cool, but debug.com predates it by quite a bit.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debug_(command)

Thus making it "a similar tool for the modern era" as you were asking for, IMO.

My favorite thing about WinDbg is that many people pronounce it "Windbag".

WinDbg is just a debugger: it does not assemble or disassemble. It can't patch running programs in memory. Moreover, I don't consider Windows to be part of the modern era, as I haven't used a Windows machine for 20 years.

So, no, WinDbg has nothing to do with debug.com.

I'm not sure what you think a (native) debugger that can't disassemble would look like; I assure you it disassembles the instructions you debug.

Its assembler is sadly stuck in the pre-x86_64 era (and refuses to do arm at all), however it disassembles all of those fine.

Signed: someone who does pronounce it wind bag

> I don't consider Windows to be part of the modern era, as I haven't used a Windows machine for 20 years.

I don't consider France to be part of the modern world, since I haven't visited Europe lately.

A more apt analogy: I don't consider North Sentinel Island to be part of the modern world, since there is no relevant innovation going on there, it has no influence on the rest of the world, and there is nothing to be learned there.

You miss debug.com, wish there was an equivalent for the modern era, find out that windbg does almost all these things today, and say there's nothing of value there.

I say this as something who does all the things you described debug.com as doing, in this modern era.

You are missing the point.

Windows is not a platform for serious people.

Maybe so, but that's not what you claimed. You claimed that WinDbg "does not assemble or disassemble", when of course it does. Try to be more accurate with your claims if you want serious people to take you seriously.

What I said, in part, is:

> Moreover, I don't consider Windows to be part of the modern era,

Why are you lying about what I said when everyone can see it?

Actually, I didn't even get to this part of your message, windbg absolutely can patch currently running programs. It does all the things you think it can't do.

Okay, but is it not what you wished for, "a similar tool for the modern era"?

edit: I see I simul-posted with u/modeless, but I can't remove it now that there's a (duplicate) reply. Maybe mods can remove or at least collapse mine (their ID is one lower so they were first)

So, no, WinDbg has nothing to do with debug.com.

Fun! So how was OP supposed to know your very personal and weird definition of what is part of the modern era?

If OP wanted to know whether WinDbg and debug.com can be considered feature-similar, they could have read my first comment [1], where I specifically said that debug.com is a "debugger, *assembler*, and *disassembler*". Of those three features, WinDbg provides one.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48362927

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