Periscope manuals

Periscope was the best debugger of its era. However the price – due to hardware support – and quick changes in PC architecture plus introduction of debug registers (among other features) to 386 eventually made it extinct. It was still a lot cheaper than any ICE back then.

SoftIce from NuMega also – thanks to exploiting 386 features, hence being able to be implemented as name suggest in software only – was another reason why people forgot about this great debugger.

Today – thanks to Michael Necasek from os2museum – you can get a copy of Periscope manuals. Since Periscope had a II-X version which was software only (in fact model II was software only as well – the only hardware addition was breakout switch generating NMI interrupt) you may try to run it under DosBox (as it partially “works”). but in reality running it under real MS-DOS VM is currently the only option next to running it on real hardware. Unfortunately running Periscope/32 or Periscope models I or IV under emulation is out of question. The latter one requires a second PC and a serial connection (this however may work just like for Turbo Debugger assuming you will be able to run proper Periscope version under DosBox), but models I and IV requires hardware boards with additional memory.  I doubt any DosBox developer will write proper emulation for this hardware, especially considering that DosBox targets games not low-level software like hardware assisted debuggers. QEMU could be another possible target and there are still people around who knows how the original hardware works. Any volunteers?

For now have fun and go and get the manuals here.