Swings and Roundabouts

I've spent the last week trying to get a GUI interactive debugger together for Miggy and have ended up bouncing all over the place.

The big pain is trying to fit the disassembly output into a list of some description so that a user can view the code, interactively step through it and set breakpoints etc. Out of the box the JTable and JList are not going to do it for me without some serious hacking about I think.

These list type controls are backed by a model class that supplies the actual data and information such as the number of available entries to the list. This in turn controls the scrollbar range and response once the list is embedded in a JScrollPane.

My issue is that without disassembling the whole of the available emulator memory I won't know how many entries will be available for the list. Each instruction can be comprised of as little as 2 bytes or upwards of 8.

What I want to do is only disassemble enough rows to fill the visible area of the list and control the scrolling so that I can effectively create a sliding window view over the emulator's memory. Perhaps the best route would be to either have a separate JScrollBar which I use to update the sliding window, or provide my own "up and down" buttons to control the view.

Actually that sounds like a plan, I can control the number of rows in the list so that they equal the number visible rows on display, and use input from a separate scrollbar or other control to change the sliding view of memory.

Blimey, writing this entry has actually helped clear this up a lot in my mind. A bit like when you explain a problem to a colleague only to realise the solution mid-explanation. If only I'd done this a couple of days ago ;)