DebugBox

DebugBox is an external debugger for DOSBox.

Basically DOSBox has built-in debugger and it's good enough, but as a console application it has limited usability.

Features

• uses D-Bus for inter-process communication with DOSBox.

Build steps

Requirements

1. Rust
   • Install Rust.
2. Docker
   • Docker to build DOSBox

DebugBox

Execute

• cargo build to compile in debug mode or
• cargo build --release for release mode.

DOSBox

You can build DOSBox locally but it's more convenient to do this in Docker:

cd ./dosbox
docker build -t dosbox .
docker run --rm --entrypoint bash dosbox -c 'cat /app/dosbox-staging/src/dosbox; sleep 1' > dosbox-dbus
chmod +x dosbox-dbus

Test from the shell

Start the DOSBox and hit Alt + Pause (Fn + Alt + P on modern keyboards) to break in.

Get the value of EAX:

busctl --user call com.dosbox /cpu/regs/eax com.dosbox get

Resume execution with the following command:

busctl --user call com.dosbox /cpu com.dosbox run