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What's up with the GEAR Prop Debugger Emulator? — Parallax Forums

What's up with the GEAR Prop Debugger Emulator?

DroneDrone Posts: 433
edited 2009-10-19 22:10 in Propeller 1
Hi, On my list of things to do this weekend was to have a go at the venerable GEAR Propeller debug/emulate tool. Tried to download it tonight (I'm GMT+7) from the Sourceforge GEAR project home, but I get a 404 error when I click the download button. Maybe it is a Sourceforge problem; dunno... I also get a 404 when I click the download GEAR URL in the Propeller Forum link when GEAR was seemingly first announced. What's up with GEAR lately? I reference some links:

GEAR Home:

sourceforge.net/projects/gear-emu/

It seems this is the original GEAR post in this Forum:

http://forums.parallax.com/showthread.php?p=624986

Thanks for any replies... David

Post Edited (Drone) : 10/17/2009 5:06:46 PM GMT

Comments

  • Bob Lawrence (VE1RLL)Bob Lawrence (VE1RLL) Posts: 1,720
    edited 2009-10-17 17:00
    Try This:

    sourceforge.net/projects/gear-emu/files/gear-emu/1.11.0.0/Gear-1.11.0.0.zip/download
  • XlogicXXlogicX Posts: 18
    edited 2009-10-17 17:11
    And that software is awesome by the way. I couldn't have written some of my software without it.
  • DroneDrone Posts: 433
    edited 2009-10-17 17:21
    Thanks Bob,

    That was quick. Download went fine given your link Bob. How did you get the download link? BTW the MD5 checksum for my GEAR download was:

    MD5 checksum of Gear-1.11.0.0.zip: 789d408878a7a8bceb4b44cf3a3f031b

    Don't see any documentation though after extracting the .zip. I'll fly blind with GEAR for the moment and see how it goes. I have not seen a GEAR update since first release in 2007 (perhaps no-need). But still, it seems even today others use it with success. I'll send a PM to the GEAR Author about the download problem.

    Thanks again Bob... David

    Post Edited (Drone) : 10/17/2009 5:30:01 PM GMT
  • potatoheadpotatohead Posts: 10,261
    edited 2009-10-17 17:26
    I've got a very basic, and somewhat dated now, intro to GEAR in my Assembly Language Primer For The Absolute Beginner" document, found here:

    http://forums.parallax.com/forums/attach.aspx?a=28716

    In that same thread, you will find DeSilva's excellent follow on document. My document is updated, from time to time. I'll put GEAR on the list. What is there is not much, but is enough to get you going. The rest is not tough to sort out, once you've ran a successful sim or two. I too made heavy use of GEAR early on. Part of it was wanting to explore PASM without a Prop handy, the other part was to just check stuff out and see how Propeller runs things.

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  • DroneDrone Posts: 433
    edited 2009-10-17 18:27
    @XlogicX:

    Yes I saw your post with the audio driver objects. I'll have a look at them a bit later. I see GEAR was a very helpful for you in your post.

    @potatohead

    Thanks for the reminder about your "Assembly Language Primer For The Absolute Beginner" which contains some GEAR info. I'll have a look at the thread regardong DeSilva's contribution you mention (miss DeSilva BTW). You said, "Part of it was wanting to explore PASM without a Prop handy..." Yes this is what I want to do; basic simulation of the Propeller in Spin and PASM on a (relatively) disposable Netbook. Normally I will not allow Microsoft bloat and attendant security issues on my primary machine running Windows with the likes of .NET Framework. But now I can with a Netbook running WinXP Home (GEAR requires .NET 2.0). Yes I could run Windows in a bastioned Virtual Machine and maybe do the same thing. But little Netbooks are nice "scratchpads" with native Windows installs. And I can carry them around easily.
  • ManAtWorkManAtWork Posts: 2,178
    edited 2009-10-17 19:12
    "Real programmers don't document. If it was hard to write it should be hard to read" lol.gif

    Sorry for beeing ironic, I don't doubt that GEAR is really useful. But the readme.txt says nothing about what I should do to install it. If I simply start the exe file it throws an error message, something like "application could not be started, click ok to terminate". I also don't find any hints in the propeller wiki. No help file, no manual, no link. sad.gif what is .NET?
  • potatoheadpotatohead Posts: 10,261
    edited 2009-10-17 20:39
    One other thing to consider, for Propeller portability, is a battery powered setup, with video capture. That whole thing can reside in a small box, or perhaps inside the netbook bag and be up and running very, very quickly. Connect two USB cables, power up Prop, and you are off and running.

    I do this all the time. It rocks for general programming on the Propeller. I don't often use a battery, but I have. Truth is a wall wart isn't all that big of a deal to connect.

    If you've got security / stability concerns, shove the whole works into a VM. That's only default XP load, .NET, Proptool, your editor of choice, data, etc... From there, just boot that, run your simulations, and you even get a "save state", should you be interrupted or something. In my case, I've one default work / play laptop running XP. Anything scary / worrisome ends up in a VM, along with some rather large PLM (engineering product data lifecycle management) software environments. In about 10 minutes, I can bring up a virtual server, several clients, and run test scenarios on a "working" system, without having to be tethered to a bunker somewhere like what used to be required.

    Get a large 7K RPM disk and the full compliment of RAM for your primary machine and virtualize a bunch of stuff. The net result will be quite stable and very secure, depending on what you choose to do with the VM's. One I keep handy is the sucker / guinea pig VM for browsing dark / unknown corners of the net. Fire that one up, and if it gets borked, undo disks, and it's as if it all never happened.

    IMHO, the best performer is VMWare. The player can be had for free, and with a little thought can be used to do most anything. The easiest to use is Microsoft VPC. It's a bit slower, but has nice options that require a bit less technical admin. I started with VMWare, but ended up running VPC because the higher end performance just didn't matter much to me.

    ▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔
    Propeller Wiki: Share the coolness!
    Chat in real time with other Propellerheads on IRC #propeller @ freenode.net
    Safety Tip: Life is as good as YOU think it is!

    Post Edited (potatohead) : 10/17/2009 8:53:30 PM GMT
  • mirrormirror Posts: 322
    edited 2009-10-17 21:41
    You should be able to download a copy of GEAR with more updates (and source) from here:

    http://forums.parallax.com/forums/default.aspx?f=25&m=242685

    If it wont load, then it could be that it needs .NET 2.x installed.

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  • XlogicXXlogicX Posts: 18
    edited 2009-10-17 22:07
    @ManAtWork: complete lols at your silly quote on no documentation. It's funny for obvious reasons. It was hard to write the code that I did, and impossible to read afterwards (even if I stepped away for 2 minutes). I had to document each line of code, actually, I had to document more than that.

    As far as the error you got trying to start GEAR; I think I got that same error when trying to run GEAR on my Vista machine, but it worked fine on an XP one. I haven't tried it on my XP image on my VMWare (on the Vista machine) yet though. I hope you get it working, it really does clear problems in code up, if you look at the write things.
  • DroneDrone Posts: 433
    edited 2009-10-18 06:10
    @Mirror, The link you provided has a lot of newer GEAR stuff - as you said. Thanks a bunch. David

    @XlogicX, What version of GEAR are you using? Have you seen the files at the Forum link provided by Mirror?
  • Bob Lawrence (VE1RLL)Bob Lawrence (VE1RLL) Posts: 1,720
    edited 2009-10-19 18:29
    Drone said...
    How did you get the download link?

    I just used the search engine on sourceforge.com

    Not that it mattered because the version that mirror updated is what most of as are using, although I didn't have that URL handy at the time and you didn't state why you wanted the sourceforge. version. It would be nice if someone could update the version on sourceforge.


    idea.gif Maybe one of the Gear experts can make a few how to examples and put them on youtube for people with less experience.


    @mirror

    Thanks! for the work you put into the updates. My introduction to the Propeller was on Gear. It was good enough to get me hooked. yeah.gif
  • mirrormirror Posts: 322
    edited 2009-10-19 22:10
    Bob, thanks for the appreciation, but I was standing on the shoulders of a visionary (asterick).

    I started on real hardware doing spin and pasm, but turned to GEAR when I needed to figure out how the assembly language worked. I found it invauable to my work which is why I started contributing to the effort. I think that asterick left the forum a little while before I joined it, as I have never seen any comment from him on the changes I made, or any other subject for that matter.

    Unfortunately I'm not doing much Propeller stuff at the moment, but I do keep an eye on the forum.

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