Path: chuka.playstation.co.uk!news
From: Toby Sargeant <toby@forefront.com.au>
Newsgroups: scee.yaroze.freetalk.english
Subject: yet another siocons replacement
Date: Fri, 13 Feb 1998 10:40:48 +1100
Organization: Forefront Software Services
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Hi,

In order to address one of the many tool deficiencies that we unix users have
to suffer, I'm working on another siocons.

Rather than this just being yet another beefed up terminal emulator, I'm
intending to provide an API to the functionality that the standard siocons
provides. This way, it's trivial for anyone to write any form of interface to
it. 
  
My primary aim is to provide the ability to read symbols from object files
(using nm), and annotate disassembly, as an aid to learning to program in R3000
machine code.

Depending on whether I find documentation on the R3000 opcode format and the
HSS protocol, I'll also support RDB, so as to provide simple hooks for
debugging.

It's all written in python, so as long as I can find a good serial I/O module
for each operating system, this will also work on win95/NT/dos/OS2/MAC.  Long
live cross platform programming. Python also has excellent support for OLE and
CORBA, so I'm not planning on leaving the C/C++ programmers (completely) out in
the cold.

Suggestions as to things that you'd like to see an API provide above and beyond
straight mappings of the siocons commands are very much welcomed. Given that I
would like to see this as a possibilty to create a labour saving device for
many people out there, the more feedback I have, the easier it is to reach my
goal.

Thanks,

Toby.