Debugging Assembly Code (Intel 8086)

Question

I'm in an Assembly class focusing on the intel 8086 architecture (all compiling / linking / execution comes from running DOS on win7 via DOS-Box).

I've finished programming the latest assignment, but as I have yet to program any program successfully the first time through, I am now stuck trying to debug my code.

I have visual studio 2010 and was wondering if there was some built in feature that would help me debug my assembly code, specifically, I'm looking to track the value of a variable.

Failing that, instructions pointing to a DOS-Box debugger (and instructions!) would be much appreciated. (I think I've been able to run codeview debug, but I couldn't figure out how to do what I was looking for).

Answer 1

You are generating 16-bit code, you have to break into a museum to find better tooling. Try Borland's, maybe the debugger included with Turbo C.

Answer 2

Yes, indeed, you can use the debugger in VS to examine pretty much everything. Irvine's site has a section specifically on using the debugger here. You can examine registers, use the watch window, etc. He also has a guide for highlighting asm keywords if you need that.

Edit: as Hans pointed out, if you are using 16-bit instead of 32-bit protected, you'll need different tools. There are several choices, listed here.

Answer 3

Borland's tools for DOS were called tasm, tlink, and tdebug.