Crossware

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Overview

The Simulator operates in conjunction with the Embedded Development Studio and integrates seamlessly with it.  The following paragraphs provide an overview of how the two components work together.

The Embedded Development Studio automatically detects the presence of the ColdFire simulator by looking for a file called sim.dll located in the

<installation directory>\ColdFire\bin directory.

where <installation directory> is the directory into which the complete package is installed.  

Therefore sim.dll must remain in this directory and must not be renamed.  The installer will normally look after placing the simulator in the appropriate directory.  The simulator remains inactive until a ColdFire project is created and/or opened.  Once such a project is open, the Embedded Development Studio activates the simulator, places an additional Simulate item on the menu bar and instructs the simulator to initialise itself.  Normally, at this point, the simulator will place an additional Toolbar on the Embedded Development Studio workspace.

If the project type is for an executable program (as opposed to a library) the Go, Step Into and Trace commands will be active on the Simulate menu.  If the cursor is located in a source file window, the Step to Cursor and Set Breakpoint at Cursor commands will also be active.  When any of Go, Step Into, Trace and Step to Cursor commands are used, the Embedded Development Studio will check that the ColdFire program exists and is up-to-date and instruct the simulator to load it.  As well as loading the ColdFire program, the simulator will update the menu bar and status bar of the Embedded Development Studio.  The Build and Simulate menu bar items of the Embedded Development Studio will be removed and replaced with Simulate, Peripherals and Options menu bar items from the Simulator.  Additional items will be added to the View and Windows menus.

After loading the program and updating the Embedded Development Studio, the simulator will open and position any simulator specific windows that were open when it last loaded this same program.  This persistent information is stored in the same directory as the program file and with the same file name as the program but with a .CFS extension.  The Simulator will also retrieve any non-source level breakpoints and other information from this file.

Once the Simulator has loaded the ColdFire program, initialised itself and updated the Embedded Development Studio, the Embedded Development Studio will transfer further information to the Simulator.

All source level breakpoint information will be transferred.  The simulator will set a breakpoint at the program address corresponding to the source line indicated to it.  If there is not an exact match between the source line and a program address, the breakpoint will be positioned at the nearest following source line.  If there is no appropriate following source line, the breakpoint is disabled.