Stella v6.1

March 30th, 2020, 22:14 Posted By: wraggster

Stella v6.1 is compiled. Stella is a multi-platform Atari 2600 VCS emulator. The Atari 2600 Video Computer System (VCS), introduced in 1977, was the most popular home video game system of the early 1980's. Now you can enjoy all of your favorite Atari 2600 games on your PC thanks to Stella!

Stella v6.1 changelog:
IMPORTANT NOTES:
Because of major event remapping changes, all remappings will be reset to defaults; if you had custom mappings, they will need to be re-entered again.
Because of major internal changes, all state files are now invalid.
Support for Windows XP has been discontinued as of this version. WinXP is now completely out of support from Microsoft, so we are doing the same.
Major improvements to display mode handling in NTSC vs. PAL. The window is now the same size for both modes, and scaling is applied to simulate the height of scanlines (in PAL mode, there are more scanlines and hence each is narrower). This more properly emulates how the display would look on a real TV.
Removed the 'Display_Height' property, changing it to 'Display_VCenter'. This new feature, along with the display mode changes above, almost completely eliminate having to manually tweak each ROM so that it will not have part of the image cut off.
Removed the 'Display_YStart' property and all automatic detection of ystart. It caused problems on some ROMs, and was not the way a real console would work anyway. Related to this, ROMs now load much faster.
Major improvements to event remapping:
Allow mapping of modifier-key and button-direction combinations
Physical controllers can map the same action to different events on different virtual controllers
Many more events can be remapped
Events can be filtered by type in UI
Paths have been simplified:
The following file/directory locations are no longer configurable
(statedir, nvramdir, cheatfile, palettefile, propsfile); they are now all under the base directory
Removed cfgdir; Distella config files are now placed with their associated ROMs
Added 'basedir' commandline argument, which allows to change the base directory where almost all config-related items are stored; related to this, discontinued the 'basedir.txt' functionality
Added 'baseinappdir' commandline argument, which sets the base directory to the application folder (Windows only for now); this replaces the functionality of 'basedir.txt'
Added automatic controller detection.
Controllers can be changed during emulation (no ROM reload required anymore).
Added support for Light Gun controller.
Added limited KidVid support (8, 9 and 0 start the games).
Removed superfluous controller option 'PADDLES_IDIR'.
Added configurable paddle dejittering.
Key-repeat mode improved; entering Time Machine by holding down a key combo continues to send events (previously, you had to release and then press the combo again).
Certain buttons in the UI can now be activated repeatedly by holding down the mouse button (Time Machine, debugger step/trace/frame advance, etc.)
Added option to configure mouse double click speed.
Added option to configure controller input repeat speed.
Added high quality scaling.
Made scanlines better aligned to scaling.
Added 'HiDPI' mode, which scales the UI by 2x when enabled. This is meant for 4k and above monitors, but can actually be used at any lower resolution that is large enough to display the scaled UI.
Fixed TIA 'Center' option, Stella now remembers the last windowed position.
Added fractional (25% increments) TIA zooms.
Removed 'tia.fsfill' option, replacing it with 'tia.fs_stretch'. This new option allows to preserve TIA image aspect ratio in fullscreen mode, or stretch to fill the entire screen.
Added configurable 'Overscan' option for fullscreen modes.
Fullscreen TIA modes no longer assume that desktop taskbars, etc are present, hence they are scaled to the proper fullscreen size.
Added option to display dialogs in screen corners.
Added hotkey for sound on/off.
Enhanced 'Command' menu to display current state and more commands.
Added option to save and load all TimeMachine states at once.
Added option to automatically load/save states when entering/exiting emulation.
Added option to change pitch of Pitfall II music.
ROM Info Viewer size is not limited to fixed zoom steps anymore.
ROM Info Viewer can now display multiple lines per property and the bank switching type.
In file listings, you can now select directories by holding 'Shift' on the first character entered. Entering characters in lowercase still selects files, as before.
Fixed bug when starting ROMs via MacOS finder.
Added various developer options for oddball TIAs:
stuffed player, missiles and ball move
delayed playfield bits and color
delayed players and ball VDEL swap
Disabled some developer options for 'Player settings'.
Writes to RAM read ports are ignored now.
Added Developer setting, which breaks on writes to read ports.
Improved breakpoints to now consider the banks.
Improved debugger's TIA display and zoom windows.
Improved hotkeys, now many emulation keys work in debugger too.
Fixed display of negative values in debugger; sometimes they were shown as positive.
Reworked ROM properties database, making it load faster in certain cases.
Updated internal ROM properties database to ROM-Hunter version 16 (thanks go to RomHunter for his tireless research in this area). Related to this, updated the snapshot collection.
Fixed 'Dancing Plate (Unknown) (PAL)' to use joystick.
Fixed cheatcode handling in 2K and 4K ROMs.
Fixed bug where ROMs smaller than 64 bytes were not recognized.
Fixed bug where frying one ROM was continued with the next ROM.
Fixed not working 7800 pause key.
Enhanced UA bankswitching to support certain Brazilian carts.
Fixed WD bankswitching.
Added FC bankswitching for Amiga's Power Play Arcade Video Game Album.
Added auto-detection of display format based on filename.
Auto-detection of bankswitch scheme by file extension now includes more human-readable formats (not restricted to DOS 3-char length). See the documentation for the new names.
Fixed bug in DPC+ scheme; 'fast fetch mode' was enabled at startup, when it should be disabled by default.
Some more work on DPC+ playfield 'jitter' effect for certain older DPC+ driver versions; more ROMs are now detected properly. Special thanks to SpiceWare for his research in this area.
Added proper Retron77 port.
Added proper libretro port, and fixed display for OpenGLES renderers.
PNG/ZIP image support is now conditionally compiled into Stella. All major ports (Linux/macOS/Windows) have it enabled by default.
SDL/GUI support is now conditionally compiled into Stella. All major ports (Linux/macOS/Windows) have it enabled by default. This is currently needed by the libretro port.
Updated included PNG library to latest stable version.
Updated UNIX configure script to work with the gcc version 10 and above.


https://github.com/stella-emu/stella


http://www.emucr.com/2020/03/stella-v61.html

There are 0 comments - Join In and Discuss Here