The emulator saga continues!!  For all who are interested, the folks in
applied research will be demonstrating and giving their opinions of 
the HMI system and the AMS running XRAY with SCSI download.  There will
be no salesmen present, only Atari programmers experiences.  Come to
the Applied Research lab at 1:00 on Wed. Feb. 27 if you are interested.

Matt

For those people who missed the HMI demo today (or couldn't see or hear 
anything because there was no room in my office) here is a brief recap
of our experiences with the HMI emulator running HMI SourceGate debugger
software :

HMI Emulator

Pros

- Fast Download speed

Because it downloads using the parallel printer port of the PC, program 
downloads are extremely fast.  The ZAX emulator and the HMI have roughly
equivalent download times, which is about twice as fast as an AMS with fast
download capabilities

- Source Level Trace

It is possible to view the trace in assembly, bus state or source forms and
to search the buffer for address, data and other conditions.  The trace can
be time tagged if desired.

- Performance Analyzer

Although a little tricky to set up, the performance anlyzer features of the 
HMI are powerful.  Code coverage analysis and performance timing information
are available.

- All Emulator features are Available from debugger

Because both the emulator and the debugger are from the same vendor, all 
emulator features (trace, hardware events etc.) are directly accessible from
the debugger.  Because XRAY is an emulator independent debugger, not all
emulator features are available from XRAY

Cons

- Flaky !!!

This unit does some very unpredictable things, and these things usually happen
at the worst possible time.  Software breakpoints do not always seem to work
and sometimes calling the trace buffer causes the debugger to crash. HMI is
bringing a new emulator to see if this will fix our problems but it seems more
like a problem with the debugger software.

- Poor User Interface

Not all functions are available from the command line.  To do some seemingly
simple things (such as setting a write break on a location), requires a great
deal of mucking around with various windows.  The macro facility is weak and
only works for command line commands.  There are a lot of flashy colors, but
the colors don't really mean anything and do not help the debugging process.
The general philosophy seems to be that flashy colors and windows make a good
user interface.  The debugger works with a mouse (which XRAY doesn't).  With
that exception, XRAY is definitely a better debugger than SourceGate.

- Slow Single Step

Single stepping is very slow.  Single stepping source lines is beyond sluggish
bordering on painful. No facility is provided to step around subroutine calls.

- Not all features available for Microtec Compiler yet

In Applied Research we are using the Microtec Greenhills compiler, which 
outputs in IEEE-695 format.  Structure viewing, and viewing of local and 
register variables is not supported with IEEE-695 format although HMI promises
support "real soon now ..."

In summary, the HMI system has good features but still has software problems
to work out before we should consider the purchase of any more units.  If 
anyone has any more questions or would like to play around with the system
please give me a call at x1773 or drop by the Applied Research lab.

Matt