I'd like to look inside xmame a little and as a start, simply using gdb to step through an execution would be great.

Within the xmame Makefile, you can specify compiler option -ggdb, but this does not seem to create the necessary symbol information gdb needs. After remaking, when I run xmame.x11 in a gdb session, it cannot find the symbol info.

Has anyone compiled/linked xmame in this manner successfully?

Also, it looks like xmame (or mame at least) has a special debugger of it's own. Does anyone have experience with using this debugger or know what it is or know where I can find some specifc technical info on it? I'm not having much luck searching for technical specifics on mame or xmame - most of the info I've come up with is about using it and not about getting into the nuts and bolts of the app.

Thanks