What is the best ARM IDE/simulator out there for newbies?

[devmas]

I am the kind of person who is afraid to code until I get fairly comfortable with something.

Looking through this forum today, I found this 6502 Simulator. It's the most comfortable thing ever to learn code in, and I feel I'm getting pretty good at it, writing various kinds of subroutines. Basically, it's a very simple IDE with an assembler, debugger (with flags, registers, stack pointer and even program counter editable during debugging), and an information tool which tells you exactly what each instruction is and how its used as you type. It also has some I/O stuff, like a text console that you can interact with though code.

Basically, it's so easy to write code, then run it in the program and see exactly what's going on with my code everywhere, 100% of the time.

My question is, is there anything like this for ARM? I really want to get comfortable with ARM, as I feel like it's becoming increasingly important. I know ARM is a little more complicated than 6502, and I intend to get more comfortable with 6502 before moving on to ARM, but ARM is definitely my ultimate goal.

(Actually, my next step should be to get comfortable with C++, but it isn't nearly as interesting...)

Edit: Oh, no URL tags...? Oh well.

[mic_]

I would suggest the Gameboy Advance as a learning platform. It uses the ARM7TDMI which is pretty outdated, but it should be good enough for you to get started.I think both Visualboy Advance and no$gba have debuggers that allow you to step through your code.

Here's a short example of mine of assembly programming on the GBA: http://jiggawatt.org/badc0de/thinngba.zip

[devmas]

Thank you. Yes, when I start with ARM, I'm definitely going to do it with the GBA in mind. I thought about starting with the DS for a while, but a lot of factors say no.

However, I'm sort of looking for a nice development environment, like an IDE I guess, to serve as a guide while I learn ARM.