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Old 04-25-2004, 00:46
dcow
 
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Def for ICE

Quote:
Originally Posted by Katrin
Thanks JMI, Iczelion is something like an epicenter/a must. Will check him. Btw you know what these letters ICE mean (instant code engineering?)??? (have googled once but didn't found a definition as i remember well so question still remains). Cheers.

Before the advent of software based debuggers, there was ICE (In Circuit Emulation). In those very early days you plugged your ICE hardware into the CPU socket and your CPU into the ICE so there was a layer of hardware between the CPU and the computer. Since the ICE saw the address and data lines it could in a way "look" over the shoulder of the CPU and since the CPU was getting it's clock from the ICE that's how single stepping and break pointing was done. Output was LED's for the data and address busses. Hence when this was abstracted into software you got "soft" ICE and so on. Before the advent of the 386 you didn't really have a very sophisticated way of building these very low level tools. Things are much better now, although the infrastucture sometimes gets in the way.

dcow
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