These emulators have large communities with a lot of like minded and helpful people. There are other emulators to learn and experiment with: DOSBox, PCem, Qemu, Bochs. Reverse engineering is not the first thing to try. Ask the easy questions first: Is it plugged in, have I configured the software correctly, is it compatible with the system. When your investigating a new problem, keep it simple. ScummVM has a wiki that lists some other tools. Disassembling code, and stepping through instructions is one tool we can use to track down problems. DOSBox has a nice debugger that let you step through CPU instructions, read memory, log to the console what the system peripherals are doing. You mentioned DOSBox, which can be a method to experiment and learn how a specific piece of software works. Knowledge will help you chose good experiments (but I do a lot of blind guessing too). Once you’ve identified a problem you want fix you may need to experiment, run tests, collect data. The entire AO486 core is open source, the BIOS is open source, you can even read the MS-DOS source code: I may be biased because my background is in software development, but having a working knowledge of programming languages is like having a super power when it comes to learning. With everything being open sourced there’s so much information at your fingertips. A lot of what I’ve learned has come from reading source code. The better mental picture you have about how the big pieces of the system fit together the easier it will be theorize where things might break down and cause problems. General problem solving skills will go a long way, and you can learn the ins and outs of the PC as you go. No reason to spend 40 hours (or 200 hours) investigating a problem you could solve with one hour of research. Solved by people who probably spent many many hours to come up with the answer. I usually start with a search engine, many problems aren’t new and have been solved before.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |