Gearlynx Debugger

Gearlynx Debugger brings full source-level debugging to Atari Lynx homebrew development. Built as a Visual Studio Code extension and powered by the Gearlynx emulator, it lets you debug C and 6502 assembly games compiled with the cc65 toolchain, right inside your editor.

Features

• Source-level debugging for C and 6502 assembly via cc65 .dbg files, with .sym symbol-file fallback for assembly-only projects.
• Full step controls including step in/over/out, continue, pause, source-line stepping, and frame-level step back using Gearlynx’s rewind.
• Powerful breakpoints: source, conditional, hit count, logpoints, data/watchpoints, function, and instruction breakpoints.
• Variables and memory: CPU registers with individual flag bits, locals, globals, zero-page values, hardware status (Mikey timers, audio, LCD, cart), and memory inspection via the VSCode hex editor.
• Overlay support for cc65 banked ROM segments, with a runtime overlay selector.
• Live screen viewer streaming at 60fps in a dockable panel, with integer scaling and gamepad input forwarded to the emulator.
• Extra tooling: memory map visualization, CPU trace logging, and a loaded-sources list.

Requirements

• Visual Studio Code 1.87.0 or later
• Gearlynx 1.2.15 or later (the first release with --debug-monitor support)
• The cc65 toolchain for building Lynx games with debug info

Gearlynx Debugger does not bundle the emulator. Install Gearlynx separately and point the extension at it with the gearlynxDebug.gearlynxPath setting.