I am not a spambot, but it is my first message

[AsmCoder74]

Greetings to the masm32 community.

I am a long time (1974) assembly coder, flipping switches on a Digital Equipment Corp PDP-8L. I worked from 1985 to 1999 in assembly on various systems. By 1990 I had migrated to the Intel platform and, as the only assembly person most of my coworkers have ever known, wrote those small modules my employers needed for speed or compactness. (This was in the bad old DOS days.)

I retired in 1999 and took up other things. But now I want to get up to speed with Windows assembly, just for fun. I found MASM32 and have been using it to get going. The package has been helpful but I subscribe to the Test Department mindset of preferring the lowest level of programming. That may be part of my current problem.

I've installed MASM32 and the Microsoft debugging tools. I'm having trouble using the CDB debugger; I can't get it to see my source files. I've set up the environment variables and *some* of them are doing the right thing. So I'm stuck. I'm all set to start writing code but what good will it do if I can't debug anything?

Two inquiries:

(1) Help with CDB?

(2) Should I consider another debugging tool? For those of you assembly folks out there who remember CodeView, *that's* the kind of debugger I would like to use. I thought CodeView with assembly was a great debugger.

I'm looking forward to getting back in the game. Assembly coding is great brain food for us older hacks.

-- AsmCoder74

[jj2007]

(2) Should I consider another debugging tool?

Welcome in the club :icon14:

Many here use Olly. It's easy to use:
- F9 run until the first int 3 (or other exception :P)
- F7 for single step, diving into sub programs
- F8 for single step, skipping over subs

And of course, /Zi for ml.exe and /debug for link.exe

[dedndave]

hi and welcome   :t

i remember flipping switches - lol
i had the sequence memorized that would boot from tape

i will say that coding for win32 is very different from DOS
be prepared to forget most of what you held dear and learn a lot of new stuff
but, it's very rewarding - win32 is far more powerful

[AssemblyChallenge]

Welcome aboard! 

As jj2007 said, Ollydbg is VERY good (and free).

You could try GoBug from Jeremy Gordon's web site (goprog) but personally can't tell how good it is.

For DOS programs, Borland's TD (Turbo Debugger) is still unmatched.

IDA Pro is also a debugging monster but it is not free and probably overkill for what we need.

[GoneFishing]

Hello and Welcome !

...
(1) Help with CDB?
...

I think there's only one person who could help you with CDB . It's Japheth and he hadn't been online quite a long time . When I came to this forum I was happy to receive an answer from him:
http://masm32.com/board/index.php?topic=1601.msg17688#msg17688
His website is available now  at http://web.archive.org/web/20141003032346/http://www.japheth.de/
You can get  CDBA.zip here and look into the source code if you're interested.

...
(2) Should I consider another debugging tool? For those of you assembly folks out there who remember CodeView, *that's* the kind of debugger I would like to use. I thought CodeView with assembly was a great debugger.

    You may consider NTSD (console mode debugger) or WinDbg (gui debugger) , both are from Debugging Tools for Windows . Personally I prefer WinDbg  - very powerfull debugger. Try it - you may find that it looks and acts like  CodeView.
   There's also MS VisualStudio integrated debugger ... just to mention here

Have fun and good luck!

P.S.: we had similar thread here  

[rrr314159]

Welcome ASMCoder74,

I'm using WinDbg (essentially the same as CDB, but Windowed) these days, since going to 64-bit. With 32-bit I used Olly, but I think I prefer the simpler WinDbg or CDB. However I've had the same problem as you - no symbols. It doesn't bother me so much - I have 32 registers to play with, so always have key variables there - but I was hoping someone would tell you how to get it to work. I can create my .pdb file, even get WinDbg to acknowledge that it sees it - but still no symbols! So if u ever figure it out pls let me know; or else, hope you're happy with Olly.

BTW, I also flipped switches on PDP's. Someone wrote a routine that played music: hold a transistor radio up to the face plate and it would respond to the frequencies of the lights - had 100's of popular tunes. Sound quality was poor, but what do you expect from DEC. Met Dave Cutler, the guy who wrote the VAX Operating System - by himself, in a few months. He'd type for hours without pause for thought (about 45 WPM - he wasn't a great typist) and the code always worked; first time, every time. His output was limited, in fact, by his typing: if he could type twice as fast, he'd have produced twice as much flawless code. Reason I mention him: he didn't need no debugger! 

[Siekmanski]

Welcome to the forum.

[Gunther]

Hi AsmCoder74,

welcome to the forum. I think you've enough experiences to master the new challenge. Good luck.

Gunther