If 16-bit Windows had a single input queue, how did you debug applications?

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2014/11/26/10576044.aspx

by omnibrain • 12 years ago

76 28 12 years ago

blogs.msdn.com

markbnj5• 12 years ago

Sounds much more complicated than I remember it. I wrote a game called MVP Backgammon in 1991 using Borland C++ (5.x) and their integrated debugger, and do not recall any specific issues related to input queue deadlocks. You set up your PeekMessage loop or whatever and hung a breakpoint on the switch statement for the message type you needed to debug, and followed it down from there. I assume the debugger was smart enough to run its own PeekMessage loop while waiting for commands.

zwieback3• 12 years ago

Did you use OWL with BC++? That was so much better than MFC although the non-standard C++ extension was a little unsavory.

I also remember the BC++ debugger being pretty nice although I preferred CodeView.

DanielBMarkham• 12 years ago

+1 for OWL. It was my first "real" C++ framework, and it was a great way to start.

Borland had a nice tool suite but somehow just couldn't hang on to market share.

markbnj5• 12 years ago

No, the game was written directly on the Win16 API, something from which I have still not completely recovered.

bluedino• 12 years ago

Were you also responsible for MVP Paint?

markbnj5• 12 years ago

No, but it was developed at about the same time. The late Dave Snyder, founder of the company, rounded up young programmers on Compuserve and put out a ton of shareware games during that period. There was also another version of MVP Backgammon later, but I had no involvement with that one.

snarfy• 12 years ago

"How did you debug applications on it? "

With this bad boy:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SoftICE

th0ma52• 12 years ago

I remember meeting some hackers at their house a friend of mine took me to in the middle of nowhere, and I asked them where they got their software cracks, and they kind of blinked, and showed me the first dual monitor setup I had ever seen in person, with a regular system on the left, and the output of SoftICE on the right. I guess before that I had just assumed lower level things were unknowable, but after that I sure didn't.

DrPhish• 12 years ago

Was it the old VGA/Hercules combination? That was so badass It was also the only way to run dual-screen for a while, since it used a different memory region than colour displays. There was literally no way to run multiple colour adapters on the same computer at one point

zwieback3• 12 years ago

We used SoftICE extensively for driver debugging. I seem to remember a pushbutton that slid into the ISA slot to trigger a NMI but now I'm not quite sure anymore if it was SoftICE or Periscope that had that.

kosma• 12 years ago

I used to trigger NMI by shorting the first two pins on an empty ISA slot with a screwdriver (conveniently NMI and GND); stopped when the screwdriver slipped once. Thankfully nothing died on that day, but the cascade of sparks convinced me to install a proper button. ;)

markbnj5• 12 years ago

Same, but that was all we used it for. I do recall running into some horrible memory issues on another project (Iona's Orbix, but that's another story) and wishing I had SoftICE to tear it apart with. But for most application issues it was overkill. The existing debugging tools (and 3rd party stuff like Bounds Checker) were usually good enough.

yuhong3• 12 years ago

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/matt_pietrek/archive/2005/02/14/3724...

I am surprised Raymond did not mention it.

breadbox• 12 years ago

I loved having the debugger separated out onto its own screen, even if it was a monochrome screen showing a bunch of tiled windows drawn with CP437 text-mode characters. To this day I miss the perfection of that setup.

One of the first times I had to use a "modern" 32-bit debugger, one with its own top-level window on the normal desktop, I was trying to find a bug triggered by focus events. Every time I hit a breakpoint, the focus would change to the debugger, dropping another focus event into the event queue, which would naturally trigger the breakpoint again once I stopped single-stepping. Having the debugger embedded in the system you're trying to debug can be very, very annoying.

yuhong3• 12 years ago

You can still do remote debugging with WinDbg for example.

reddiric• 12 years ago

And Visual Studio.

henderson101• 12 years ago

I was just remembering my first job, where we still developed 16-bit based clients. I was thinking "Wow, I don't remember it being so difficult to debug...", then it dawned on me, everything we were doing was on machines running Win NT 4!! 16bit Delphi 1 was an amazing achievement though, and the 32bit transition was fairly painless for us too.

If 16-bit Windows had a single input queue, how did you debug applications?

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