Debug your MSX with VSCode

tniAsm does not support generating list-files. Maybe the original author can add it.

Thanks for the video, it explained a lot. Turned out I take too much for granted with modern programming. For z80 assembler build and run debugger are two separate steps. I kind of assumed it would all happen magically at once. It makes sense, Dezog is running list files. If there is no list file, there is nothing to run. Hence the error message I got.

So added a makefile and that works fine. Compile a small example, bload it on OpenMSX, all fine. Last hurdle is that when I hit F5 in VSCode it says error connecting to OpenMSX. Nearly there...

I think it could use some improvement still so let me know your thoughts, I’ll share some tomorrow as well (now, bedtime).

Edit: I’m thinking of

line address byte byte byte byte <tab>code
12000 03FF 0A 1B 2C 3D 	Label: nop

Spaces to delimit the first values, and a tab before the assembly code to delimit it. Since nr of bytes is variable (0 to infinity), and you want to know exactly where the line begins to distinguish between labels without a : and instructions, the tab helps with parsing that more reliably.

Bytes less than 4 are padded since for instructions that is the maximum and we want to keep the indentation similar for easy reading. But it can still vary since line can exceed 99999 (unlikely), address can exceed FFFFH (more likely), and bytes can exceed 4 (likely, e.g. ds 10).

I just got it working with your previous build.

But no worries I use a regexp to select the address, bytes and mnemonic and it’s relatively easy to update. This done via the filter property that allows assemblers with different output formats to work as well.

I’ll upload this release later tonight and check if your new version also works.

Completed my tests and updated the RegEx filter. You can find the latest Glass compatible release here.

This page also contains an example launch.json that contains the right filter to make it Glass compatible. Remove the filter to interpret SjasmPlus list-files natively. If anyone has another assembler outputting a proper list file, write a regular expression, and you're good to go.

Also in this release is support for ASSERTions. Check the Dezog Sample to see how that works. Don't forget to switch ASSERTions on in the Debug Console or in the launch.json.

And last but not least, I have added the pcInSlot attribute that tells in which slot,subslot,page/bank the code is expected to run. This tells OpenMSX to break in a specific ROM bank or RAM segment instead of everytime it hits that address. I added this feature particularly for my MSXUSB project where I debug Nextor ROM drivers that sit in bank 7.