Stella 2.2 review
DownloadFor many years, the Atari 2600 reigned supreme as the most popular game console on the market.
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For many years, the Atari 2600 reigned supreme as the most popular game console on the market. Years later, Atari's stranglehold on the market would dissipate as the Nintendo Entertainment System redefined 8-bit gaming, but die-hard fans and collectors still continue to support the Atari.
One would think that the weak Atari 2600 should be simple to emulate, because of its primitive architecture. However, the Atari programmers employed many devious tricks to get such an early machine to run; therefore, a working, efficient emulator is very difficult to write.
What's New:
Added new ROM browser option which works like a normal filesystem browser, allowing navigation throughout the filesystem. The old mode of browsing is still present, and can be toggled at runtime. Related to this, fixed bug whereby sorting in the ROM launcher sometimes didn't work.
Integrated stella.pro properties into the application, resulting in faster startup time. Now Stella can be redistributed as a single binary; no external files are needed, but they will still be used if present.
Reworked ROM properties files once again. The 'user.pro' file has been removed, and all user-defined properties are stored in 'stella.pro' instead. You should delete all properties files when upgrading to this version, to take advantage of the speed increases.
Reworked settings files once again. Removed all references to a global settings file. Each user now gets a user-specific settings file only. If that file doesn't exist, the built-in defaults are used.
Added 'conditional saving' of the cheatcode and settings files, so that these files are only written to disk when absolutely necessary. This doesn't really affect desktop systems, but is very useful for systems with flashram-based storage (GP2X, WinCE, etc).
Reworked Settings class, hopefully fixing a bug whereby settings weren't being saved in certain cases (most evident in the OSX port).
Added 'tiadefaults' commandline option, which can also be toggled from within the GUI. This option disables all TIA positioning 'tweaks' that typically make a game look better, and present the image exactly as it would appear on a real 2600.
Added jitter-detection code for the paddle emulation, which should eliminate an annoying 'jittering' effect when using paddles with a Stelladaptor.
Related to jitter-detection, added '-pthresh' commandline option and GUI entry, which sets a bound below which the emulation detects jitter.
Fixed crash when adding one-shot cheats.
Fixed bug in RAM comparitive searches in the debugger.
Fixed bug with setting snapshot naming type from the GUI (it was always being set to 'romname').
Re-added low compatibility CPU emulation mode, since it benefits some slower systems. This is activated with the commandline argument '-cpu low'.
For the OSX port, added Universal binary support.
For the OSX port, reworked the menu handling, so that certain menu options are only enabled when it makes sense to do so.
For the GP2X port, fixed joystick deadzone issues and scroll bug in ROM launcher.
For the GP2X port, fixed issue with PAL ROMs causing a crash because of screen size. A message is now shown indicating that PAL ROMs are not yet supported.
Stella 2.2 keywords