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# $Id: README,v 1.10 2002/04/12 23:12:21 troth Exp $
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Simulavr: A simulator for the Atmel AVR family of microcontrollers.

This program is still under development and is not ready for production
use. The simulator is stable enough for rudimentary debugging work in 
conjuction with a gdb-5.2 (see README.gdb).

At this early stage of development, when simulavr enters a failure mode, it
will print an error message and abort, thus generating a core file. This is
actually quite useful, since you can examine the core file and see what caused
simulavr to get confused. This is similar to what happens when a program seg
faults and dumps core, but the error message should at least tell you where to
start looking since it gives the file name and line number where the error
message was generated. As of version 0.0.14, I haven't seen simulavr abort in
quite some time. Take that with a grain of salt. :)

I've only been testing this with the at90s8515 since that's the only device I
have right now to compare with.

I am hoping to support all AVR devices, but am not going to work on the TINY's
and MEGA's until I get all the features of the at90s* devices working, and
have solid gdb support. If someone else would like to contribute code for TINY
or MEGA support, that would be greatly appreciated.

To build the simulator, you need to use gcc for now. There is some gcc
specific code in the source. I'm only doing this for now since it makes
debugging a little bit easier. I'll gladly accept porting feedback if someone
wishes to work on that front. I'm currently only developing using RedHat 7.2.

Some preliminary porting has been done on NetBSD and FreeBSD.

To build my test asm and C files, you need to have gcc and binutils build for
avr and installed in your path.

See the INSTALL file for more information on building and installing the
simulator.

There is the beginnings of documentation in the doc/ directory. The build
system should automatically build the info, postscript and html formats of the
documentation. If for some reason you have trouble building the documentation
from the texinfo source, check the simulavr web site. I hope to keep the
latest versions of the documenation there.
