Did you see the date on that Insight page? Ouch, that is old..
(...although I'm not sure if that's a valid complaint here on VOGONs 😉

Looks like something is holding them back from making a new release:
https://github.com/monnerat/insight/issues/16

I posted this link earlier already, it shows comparison between some of these frontends (I haven't really tested them myself).

My favorite frontend atm is gdbgui (browser-based), even though it has some quite bad shortcomings like not being able to use copy-and-paste (duh!)
Helps to keep my "casual debugging" casual I suppose...

I always thought Bochs would be a better choice for debugging a real mode target than qemu, but this was based on anecdotal evidence only.
But I guess we'll soon find out how viable a choice it is for i286 work, if TheMechanist gets the setup going for the next blockbuster demo 😉
One thing I've seen recommended for qemu is that qemu-system-i386 binary should be used for real mode, rather than x86_64 one (to avoid some bug in there AFAICR)

mr.cat wrote on 2021-03-14, 13:49:

Did you see the date on that Insight page? Ouch, that is old..

yes, unfortunately ...

mr.cat wrote on 2021-03-14, 13:49:

But I guess we'll soon find out how viable a choice it is for i286 work, if TheMechanist gets the setup going for the next blockbuster demo 😉

🤣 .. atm just little intros since I'm an one man show - without graphic artists or musicians 🙁 - and just a reasonable amateur coder in a midlife crisis 🤣

I played around with QEMU/Bochs & GDB remote debugging, using the frontends Nemiver & Gede (Linux) and gdb terminal .. as some mentioned before, debugging of i8086 real mode code is not really possible (from my limited experiences), at least not with the frontends (from gdb terminal okay) ... of course they do a good job when it comes to (source level) debugging of modern code ..

The winner is clearly MAMEs integrated debugger - a simple & clean GUI (multiple windows for breakpoints, watchpoints, memory, dasm), enhanced by various terminal commands ... the advantage over debuggers like TD running inside the VM/Emu is of course that the debugger instance is separated from the machine and the unaffected display of the output of the VM .. TDs remote debugging feature (using e.g. to DOSBox instances) is nice, but damn slow ...

To find the entry point of the program to debug I added a simple non-ending loop at the beginning of the program, where MAME "stops" execution (unfortunately there is no "jump over" command), then set a breakpoint at the following code and continue debugging with setting IP to next address ...

Turbo Debugger is the first one I use and I found it quite good. Now I'm using RHIDE but the debugger is not working. but I recall it worked many years ago in native Linux...
I was trying to find a good debugger which leads me here, VOGONS, again.

mr.cat wrote on 2021-03-08, 19:44:

The Bochs one is quite good, even if it is simple.

Thanks, Bochs solved my problem.