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Debug console

Ask a title that is already running what it is doing, without a rebuild.

Set PS3_DEBUG to a file path. A console thread watches that file; write one command into it and the answer is appended to <path>.out, then the command file is truncated ready for the next one.

RSX_LIVE_DRAW=1 PS3_DEBUG=dbg.txt ./build/simpsons.exe vfs/PS3_GAME/USRDIR/EBOOT.elf &

echo stat            > dbg.txt ; sleep 1 ; cat dbg.txt.out
echo threads         > dbg.txt
echo "mem 10000 32"  > dbg.txt
command what it answers
threads stack of every guest thread, symbolised to func_XXXXXXXX+off
hle the last HLE call the runtime dispatched
stat uptime, flip count, HLE breadcrumb, whether vm_base is mapped
mem <hex> [len] hexdump of guest memory
poke32 <hex> <val> write a guest u32 (big-endian, as the guest sees it)
knobs [prefix] which diagnostics this run was started with
help the above

Why a file and not a socket

No listening port inside a game process, nothing for a firewall to prompt about, and it drives from a shell script the same way PAD_FILE already does — which is how these titles get driven to an interesting state in the first place.

Why it is read-only apart from poke32

There is no set command, and that is deliberate rather than unfinished. The runtime has ~470 diagnostic environment variables (see DIAGNOSTICS.md) but the large majority are read once at first use and cached in a function-local static, so they are launch-time settings — set would appear to work and change nothing. knobs reports what the run actually started with, which is the honest half of that.

What it is for

The motivating case: a title that wedges ninety seconds in. The hang watchdog samples thread stacks at fixed times after start, so catching a late hang meant editing the runtime and rebuilding — a full cycle per question. threads on demand answers it directly, and stat distinguishes stopped from still running but not drawing without trawling a 200,000-line log.

A spin and a deadlock look identical in a log and are told apart by CPU time, so check that too — a process burning cores while emitting nothing is spinning, not blocked.