Abstract: The inventive system provides a set of human input and output devices such as a video monitor and keyboard, in conjunction with a processing means such as a Personal Computer, an in-circuit microprocessor emulation means, and control software which allows a software developer to interactively and intelligently view the contents of bit-mapped hardware control and status registers in a descriptive manner. Further, the system interacts with the in-circuit emulator and code development environment to automatically create hexadecimal representations of complete register values to be read and written, and performs validity rule checking in order to notify the software developer if disallowed combinations of bit fields have been selected.