Stella Changelog

What's new in Stella 6.7.1

Jan 16, 2024

Fixed broken mouse and Stelladaptor input for Driving Controller.

New in Stella 6.7 (Jun 14, 2022)

New in Stella 6.6 (Nov 17, 2021)

New in Stella 6.5.3 (Apr 21, 2021)

New in Stella 6.5.2 (Feb 26, 2021)

New in Stella 6.5.1 (Jan 25, 2021)

New in Stella 6.5 (Jan 10, 2021)

New in Stella 6.4 (Nov 2, 2020)

New in Stella 6.3 (Oct 7, 2020)

New in Stella 6.2.1 (Jun 21, 2020)

New in Stella 6.2 (Jun 8, 2020)

New in Stella 6.1.2 (Apr 26, 2020)

New in Stella 6.1.1 (Apr 5, 2020)

New in Stella 6.1 (Mar 23, 2020)

OK, it's finally time for another major release. This is a big one, with changes all across the board:
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.

New in Stella 6.0.2 (Oct 12, 2019)

New in Stella 6.0.1 (Jun 7, 2019)

New in Stella 6.0 (Dec 27, 2018)

Huge update, with changes all across the board. Major new feature is cycle-exact audio emulation, but there are many debugger improvements too.
Note: because of major TIA sound changes, the state file format has changed, and old state files will not work with this release.
New cycle exact audio core based on work by Chris Brenner (crispy); greatly improved audio emulation accuracy (i.e. E.T., Ms. Pacman).
Full rewrite of the audio subsystem; resample TIA output to target sample rate directly in Stella.
Added option to force stereo sound for all ROMs, or to use the setting on a per-ROM basis.
Threading: decouple emulation from frame rendering.
Main loop rewritten; emulating speed and timing is now much more faithful (i.e. speed in Pick'n'Pile).
Added preliminary support for 'CTY' bankswitching scheme and recently released 'Chetiry' ROMs. Special thanks to SpiceWare for adding music support to this scheme.
UI modernization (new widget look, dialog titles added, dialogs refactored).
The bankswitch scheme can now be forced by naming the ROM with a specific extension (ie: .f8s for F8SC, .fe for FE, etc). The supported extensions are the same as the ones from HarmonyCart and UnoCart.
Audio settings replaced with new 'audio.xxx' settings.
FPS setting replaced with speed setting for adjusting emulation speed.
Extra functionality for Time Machine dialog (start/stop recording; minor fixes).
When logging messages to the System Logger, condense similar messages that arrive in batches into fewer messages (including timestamps).
Fixes for collision corner cases (during HBlank).
Fixed excessive CPU usage while in UI modes (ROM launcher, debugger, etc).
The 'launcherexts' option has been replaced by a true/false option named 'launcherroms', which specifies to show only ROMs or all files in the ROM launcher.
Changes in 'Game Properties' dialog
'Default' button now affects only current tab like in all other dialogs.
'Display' and 'Console' tab changes are now immediate.
Fixed bug when selecting 'Auto-detect' format for 50Hz ROMs
Fixed bug in autodetecting Genesis controllers.
Fixed bug with 'thumb.trapfatal' commandline argument; sometimes Stella would lock up when encountering a fatal error instead of entering the debugger and displaying a message.
Fixed bug in reading from settings file with entries that were empty; the parsing was failing. This affected the 'cpurandom' argument; when all options in it were turned off, they were all turned on again during the next program run.
Fixed bug with 'hold' events; they are now released a short time after starting a ROM.
When starting Stella for the first time, the first ROM selected will determine which path to use by default for subsequent runs.
Fixed emulator crash when starting SaveKey ROMs from commandline with SaveKey messages enabled.
Fixed missing TV format update in frame stats dialog when switching display type.
Fixed missing debug color update when switching display type.
'Fill to scanline' now works for scanlines above current scanline too.
The debugger 'uhex' command is now honoured in CDF and BUS schemes.
When switching screenmodes, the sound is now paused and later resumed. This fixes popping and cracking sounds apparent on some systems, notably OSX when toggling windowed/fullscreen mode.
State file format has been optimized to be smaller, and faster loading and saving. This affects both the files saved to your computer as well as Time Machine functionality.
The ROM name saved in a PNG tEXt chunk now honours the 'snapname' setting.
Improved snapshots when phosphor is enabled.
Updated PAL palette.
Added 'Cartridge.StartBank' ROM property, to force a ROM to use a specific bank for its reset vector.
Added Developer setting, which breaks on reads from write ports. It now detects such conditions in many more cases. This new way of detecting RWP errors obsoletes the old '_rwport' debugger command, which has now been removed.
Added recently released 'Arkyology' prototype ROM to the database.
Added 'Amoeba Jump' and 'Flappy' ROMs (from the Retron77) to the database.
Fixed 'Street Racer' and 'Video Olympics' ROMs to use paddles in both ports.
If using SDL 2.0.5 or above, the calculated desktop size now takes the taskbar/dock into account (so windows should no longer overlap those areas).
For UNIX systems: in the ROM launcher, when using symlinks use the symlink pathname instead of the underlying filesystem pathname.
The UNIX builds now use the system-installed PNG and ZLIB libraries by default.
The Macintosh builds are now named 'macOS' throughout the codebase to reflect the new naming from Apple.
For better compatibility, the Windows 32-bit version does not require SSE2 anymore.
Updated included PNG library to latest stable version.

New in Stella 6.0 Pre-release 1 (Aug 7, 2018)

So, after quite some time in development, Stella 6.0 is ready for its first beta test. That's right, we're bumping the major version number up one notch. That should give you an idea of how much has changed with the code. The changelog is pretty huge, but for now I will only mention the most important features that require testing. In no particular order, they are:
Cycle-exact audio core based on work by Chris Brenner (crispy here on AtariAge). This is based on code directly from crispy's FPGA project, converted to C and eventually massaged into C++ by myself and DirtyHairy. Much more accurate sound emulation, in particular E.T. sounds correct for the first time in Stella's history. Ms. Pac-man interference patterns from mixing audio channels is also present.
Sound resampling. The old core output at 31400Hz (native resolution for the 2600). However, many systems then had to convert it to either 44.1 or 48KHz, with a resulting 'beating' effect (imperfections/popping/clicking in the output). The new core does resampling by default, allowing to output in 44.1, 48, or 96KHz, with simple (fast, less accurate) or Lanczos-based (slower, more accurate) resamplers. Several variations in settings are possible.
Improved timing. The TIA emulation and video output have been decoupled, and done in separate threads. This allows the emulation to more accurately run at the correct speed while not being affected by variations in video output. PAL games that ran too fast (or slow) should now work correctly. As well, sound now runs at a sample rate determined by the scanline count of the ROM, not a fixed 31.4KHz.
Minimized CPU usage in the UI (mostly the ROM launcher and debugger). CPU usage drops to nearly nothing in the UI when nothing is changing; in old versions, it could use up to an entire core.
Stella gets a new coat of paint :) Much improved UI, with several different themes (standard, light, classic) in a more 'flat', modern looking form. Also many nice flourishes here and there, such as tickmarks, better highlighting, much better text descriptions of items, etc. Also rearranged items slightly, moving them to more appropriate places.
New PAL palette. Should be much more like the real thing, since it was developed and tweaked by an actual PAL user (I personally don't have a PAL system nor the ability to run one).
There are many more items, but these are the ones that need the most testing. In particular, please test the following:
The accuracy of the new sound core. If you know of a 'trouble' ROM that is different in emulation compared to the real thing, then feedback on this is most appreciated.
Play around with all combinations of the stuff in the Audio Dialog (resampling mode, headroom, buffer size, etc) and report any issues.
As with the sound core testing, test any trouble ROMs that run out of spec (ie, not close to either 60Hz or 50Hz) and if possible, compare to the real console. This will tell us if the new timing code is working correctly.
Play with the UI extensively. Basically open/use/close all dialogs in all parts of the app, making sure that (a) the options are actually shown, and (b) that you don't get a blank screen/missing/not updated UI items.
For PAL users, please compare the PAL palette with your actual console, to see that it is more accurate in this release.

New in Stella 5.1.3 (Jun 11, 2018)

New in Stella 5.1.1 (Feb 22, 2018)

New in Stella 5.1 (Feb 5, 2018)

Added "Time Machine" mode, which automatically creates save states in user-defined intervals. The user can navigate back and forth within these states inside the emulator and the debugger.
Huge improvements to the disassembly view in the debugger and disassembly files created:
reformatting in debugger for better space utilization
much improved code and data detection
access tracking and indicators for TIA/IO/RAM adresses in disassembly
break vector is tracked (if used)
improved cycle count (page penalties, sums created in disassembly)
improved handling of instruction masking opcodes (e.g. BIT)
Fixed change tracking bug during rewind; changes were accumulated instead of being displayed only for the last rewind step.
Extended 'rewind' to take a second parameter which allows rewinding multiple states.
Added 'unwind' command, which undoes the latest rewind(s).
Added '<' (unwind) button to debugger.
Thumbulator support is not conditional any more.
Moved various developer related settings in new Developer Settings dialog. These settings now come in two groups (player/developer) and allow switching all settings at once.
Don't trap write accesses to the datastream pointers in CDF and BUS. This fixes -dev.thumb.trapfatal 1.
Complete rework of TV mode and ystart autodetection. The new implementation is more robust and reduces startup time.
Add two "grace lines" of black to the top of the frame when autodetecting ystart.
Fixed Genesis controller autodetect (Stay Frosty 2, Scramble, etc).
Fixed a bug in ystart autodetection that could cause screen jumps.
Fixed several bugs in holdselect, holdreset and holdjoyX commandline arguments; these now work as expected.
Fixed bug in TIA collision handling; it is now disabled in VBlank.
Improve TIA PF collision handling during hblank; this fixes a bug in Thrust ROM.
Fixed wrong display of HM values in debugger after 'HMCLR' has been executed.
Fixed bug with the debugger 'savedis' command in Windows; it wasn't actually saving the files at all. This has never been reported before, so I guess it shows how many people use that functionality.
The debugger 'savedis', 'saverom' and 'saveses' now save files in a default, user-visible directory (see the documentation for more information). In the case of 'saveses', the filename is now named based on the date and time of when the command was entered.
Fixed bug with saving snapshots in 1x mode; there was graphical corruption in some cases. Such snapshots also now include any TV effects / phosphor blending currently in use.
Fixed regular-sized snapshots when phosphor effect was enabled; sometimes the image was 'double-blended', resulting in a snapshot that was too dark.
Fixed crash when selecting 'CompuMate' as a controller type for a non-CompuMate ROM; this controller type can no longer be manually selected, and will be used automatically used for CompuMate ROMs.
Fixed cheat codes, so 7 digits codes are now accepted as described in the doc.
Fixed swapped ports being displayed wrong in System Logs and debugger.
Added options to erase the AtariVox/Savekey flash memory, either for all ROMs or only the current one. Also added a message (configurable) when the flash memory is accessed.
Access to the AtariVox/SaveKey can be signaled with a message.
Added new interface palette 'Light'.
Frame stats display made transparent. Also it now displays the real frame rate and if the developer settings group is enabled.
Improved tab auto-complete in debugger.
Added conditional traps and savestate creation to debugger.
Added 'Options...' button to debugger which gives access to the options menu during debugging.
Added debugger pseudo-register '_cyclesLo' and '_cyclesHi', which give the number of CPU cycles that have occurred since emulation started.
Added debugger pseudo-register '_fcycles', which gives the number of CPU cycles that have occurred since the frame started.
Added debugger pseudo-register '_icycles', which gives the number of CPU cycles of the last instruction.
Extended debugger 'dump' command to take a second argument, indicating the end of the range to dump data.
Improved change tracking; more values are tracked and change tracking now works in case of a break too.
Added widgets for trackball and SaveKey/AtariVox controllers.
Improved emulation of 'FE' bankswitch scheme (no user-visible changes, but internally the emulation is much more accurate compared to the real thing). Related to this, improved the debugger support for this scheme (you can now switch banks in the debugger view).
Added emulation of 7800 initial RAM values and Pause key.
Added ROM properties for 'Scramble' ROMs, and updated info for all "Champ Games" ROMs.
Added ROM properties for 'Zippy the Porcupine' ROMs, and updated info for all "Chris Spry (Sprybug)" ROMs.
Support UNIX style builds (configure / make) on OSX with both XCode / clang and g++.
Fixed error when building with uClibc-ng for ARM (thanks to Sergio Prado).
Updated included PNG library to latest stable version.

New in Stella 5.0.1 (Jul 24, 2017)

New in Stella 5.0.0 (Jul 18, 2017)

Note: because of major TIA/6502/RIOT changes, the state file format has changed, and old state files will not work with this release.
Completely new TIA core is now available, ported from 6502ts by Christian Speckner (DirtyHairy). This new core is extremely accurate, and matches real hardware in almost every test we've performed. New features include:
Meltdown emulates correct
The lap number in Pole Positions displays correctly
Artifacts in the mountains on Snoopy and the Red baron are gone
Line artifacts in Title Match Pro Wrestling and Realsports Boxing are fixed
The spurious line at the left border of Video Chess now displays correctly
All 32 char text demos from AtariAge now work perfectly (Stella 4 shows artifacts on several of these)
Stella is now the only emulator to display the "Mega Bitmap Demo" (atext.bin) from AtariAge correctly
Improved starfield effect for missiles (still TODO for ball and players)
RSYNC emulation has improved, all testcases now match real hardware
Several other ROMs that have never worked in any emulator are now emulated correctly
RDY behavior with respect to write cycles is accurate
Optional YStart autodetect and more robust frame handling
NUSIZ during player draw matches hardware
RESMx during missile draw matches hardware
Paddle emulation is slightly more accurate. As a consequence, the "paddle feel" may be slightly different from Stella 4
Fixed debug colors can now be set for each graphical object, from a choice of 'red', 'orange', 'yellow', 'green', 'blue' and 'purple'. This is accessible through the new 'tia.dbgcolors' commandline argument and within the UI.
Implemented new phosphor emulation mode, which is much closer to real TV output. Related to this, added ability to change the default phosphor blend level in the UI and through the new 'tv.phosblend' commandline argument. Special thanks to Thomas Jentzsch for the idea and implementation.
TV phosphor effect can now be force-enabled for all ROMs, instead of manually setting ROM properties for each ROM. This is accessible in the UI and through the 'tv.phosphor' commandline argument, and defaults to being off (or enabled per-ROM).
PAL color-loss and Blargg TV effects can now be enabled at the same time. Previously, when Blargg effects were enabled, PAL color-loss couldn't be shown. Related to this, the Blargg effects now use much less memory and in some cases run faster than before.
Much improved RIOT timer emulation never before seen in any emulator. Special thanks to Christian Speckner (DirtyHairy) for the implementation, and alex_79 for finding documentation that finally describes in more detail how the M6532 chip actually works.
Added BUS (experimental) and CDF bankswitching schemes, and also ARM Timer 1 support; special thanks to SpiceWare for the code.
Fixed bug with SaveKey and AtariVox not properly closing their memory files before starting another instance of the same ROM, when the ROM was opened in the ROM launcher.
Various improvements to the debugger and command prompt:
The 'cls' command now only clears the screen, not the history
The 'help' command now accepts other commands, and gives extra
information about the command (ie, 'help breakif' prints extended information about the breakif command)
Added 'palette' command, which shows a color swatch of the currently active TIA palette
Added 'debugcolors' command, which shows a legend for 'fixed debug colors' mode
The previous trap'm' commands now work when setting TIA read addresses; previously they only worked for write addresses
The previous trap'm' commands are now renamed 'trap', 'trapread' and 'trapwrite'
The TIA tab now shows 'old' contents of player and ball registers
Various UI items are crossed out when disabled, to more clearly indicate their current state
Various UI items that previously required a double-click to toggle (pixel and bit widgets) now require only a single-click.
Command completion now works with internal functions and pseudo-ops (basically, anything starting with the '_' character)
System labels (aka, register names, etc) can now be typed in lowercase. Previously, these labels always had to be uppercase.
In general, input error checking is much more strictly enforced
Read-only UI items now have a different background color, to clearly indicate if an item can be modified.
Debugger '.lst' and '.sym' files are now searched based on the name of the ROM file, and not on the internal properties name.
Snapshots can now be saved by pressing the F12 key (the various other ways to save snapshots still exist).
Mouse grabbing is now enabled in windowed mode only when the ROM is using a virtual analog controller (paddles, trakball, etc).
Renamed various trakball-like controllers more accurately: AmigaMouse, AtariMouse (previously CX80) and Trakball (previously CX22). Related to this, reduced the resolution of the Trakball by half, to properly match real hardware.
The stack pointer (SP) is now initialized to $FD instead of $FF, to match research done in other 6502 projects.
Fixed bug in debugger tracing and displaying the partial TIA image; the first time entering the debugger and starting to trace, the image was blanked out (black) instead of being drawn in greyscale. Also, the image is now synchronized, instead of being two frames behind.
Fixed crash with zipped ROMs that are less than 4K in size; so far this bug has only ever occurred in Windows XP, but it's been there since Stella 4.1.
Fixed bug in 'Rom Audit' functionality; sometimes ROMs without a valid properties entry were being renamed as "Untitled.bin".
For the entire UI, removed colons and generally made the UI items easier to read.
When in 'ROM launcher mode', Stella now uses slightly less CPU time. More work is required in this area, though.
Added ROM properties for D.K. VCS homebrew ROM, thanks to Andreas Dietrich.
Added slight improvement for auto-detecting Superchip bankswitching; the new implementation now works for the NTSC 'Dig Dug' ROM. Special thanks for SpiceWare for the idea and modified implementation.
Fixed long-standing bug in 3-voice music in DPC+ bankswitching scheme; the music now sounds much more like the real thing.
For the Linux/UNIX port:
The settings directory now uses the XDG Base Directory Specification. In most cases, this means that your files will now be stored in '$HOME/.config/stella' instead of '$HOME/.stella'. To keep your old settings, run the following commands from the terminal:
cd ~
mv .stella .config/stella
You will probably need to edit '~/.config/stella/stellarc' and change some paths accordingly.
For the OSX port:
Always use the built-in png and zlib libraries instead of the system versions.
The preferences file has changed from 'net.sourceforge.Stella.plist' to 'Stella-emu.plist'. To keep your old settings, run the following commands from the terminal:
cd ~/Library/Preferences
mv net.sourceforge.Stella.plist Stella-emu.plist
Updated internal ROM properties database to ROM-Hunter version 13 (thanks go to RomHunter for his tireless research in this area). Related to this, updated the snapshot collection.
Updated included PNG and ZLIB libraries to latest stable version. Also, both libraries are now compiled into the app whenever one is selected. This fixes issues with a newer ZLIB not working with an older PNG, etc.
Updated build scripts for Visual Studio 2017 (Windows) and MacOS Sierra (latest version of Xcode), and make these the minimum supported versions for building Stella.
Updated UNIX configure script to work with the clang 5+ and gcc 7+ compiler versions, and fixed compile issues on AArch64 and ppc64le architectures.

New in Stella 4.7.3 (Nov 23, 2016)

New in Stella 4.7.2 (Mar 26, 2016)

New in Stella 4.7.1 (Feb 17, 2016)

New in Stella 4.7 (Jan 27, 2016)

New in Stella 4.6.7 (Oct 29, 2015)

New in Stella 4.6.6 (Oct 29, 2015)

New in Stella 4.6.5 (Sep 29, 2015)

New in Stella 4.6.1 (Apr 24, 2015)

New in Stella 4.6 (Mar 23, 2015)

New in Stella 4.5 (Mar 23, 2015)

New in Stella 4.2 (Mar 23, 2015)

New in Stella 4.1.1 (Sep 19, 2014)

New in Stella 4.1 (Sep 19, 2014)

New in Stella 4.0 (Jul 2, 2014)

New in Stella 3.9.3 (Jun 13, 2014)

New in Stella 3.9.2 (Sep 3, 2013)

New in Stella 3.9.1 (Aug 22, 2013)

Note: because of TIA/6502 changes, the state file format has changed again, and old state files will not work with this release.
Several bugfixes and improvements to the debugger:
Improved display of debugger when using larger video modes. There are now three font sizes, which are automatically selected when the debugger is sized accordingly. When using larger fonts, the extra space is now used more efficiently.
Fixed bug in disassembly when the mirror used for the current PC didn't match the mirror for the current bank. In this case, the disassembler became confused and didn't properly track the PC address.
Fixed bug in display of current TIA frame number in the UI; depending on how breakpoints were set, it was sometimes off by one.
Fixed RAM widget Search/Compare textboxes; entering any data and then pressing 'Enter' / clicking 'OK' locked the UI until exiting and re-entering the debugger.
Changed display for various TIA position counters to decimal (from hex) in the TIA tab. Related to this, all data input widgets in the UI now have the ability to enter binary, decimal or hex values by using the proper leading character (\, #, $, respectively).
Added 'INTIM Clks' to the 'I/O' tab. which shows the number of clocks between each 'step' of the INTIM timer.
Added ability to modify 'tiadriven' commandline argument to the 'TIA' tab, and 'ramrandom' to the 'I/O' tab. These options were available for quite some time, but they weren't exposed in the UI.
Added 'cpurandom' commandline argument, and associated UI item to the 'I/O' tab. This works similar to 'ramrandom', and randomizes the contents of the CPU registers on ROM startup.
Added 'uhex' debugger prompt command, which toggles all hexadecimal display between upper/lower case. This setting is also saved in the settings file as argument 'dbg.uhex'.
Removed 'loadsym' command from the debugger prompt, since the DASM symbol file is always loaded anyway, making the command redundant. Related to this, fixed loading symbols with ###.name convention; the leading number is now stripped.
Added support for DASM lst files (created with the -l option). For now, the contents are only partially used, to detect constants vs. symbolic addresses in the symbol file. Eventually, further information from the lst file may be used.
The GRPx and PFx registers in the TIA output now show inactive background pixels as either blanked or with the underlying object colour, instead of always being black. This gives a more accurate representation of how the registers are actually drawn onscreen. Thanks to Tjoppen of AtariAge for this idea and sample code.
The 'Source Address' locations for the CPU registers now show labels where appropriate.
Renamed 'Override properties' dialog (accessible from the ROM launcher by a right-mouse-button click) to 'Power-on options', with the following new options:
Set start-up state for both joysticks as well as console select/ reset buttons. Related to this, added 'holdjoy01' and 'holdjoy1' commandline arguments, and removed 'holdbutton0' argument.
The ability to load the ROM directly from this dialog, after changing any settings, and also to start in the debugger.
Added more detailed information as to how to use this functionality to the UI.
Buttons held down are reset approx. 0.5 seconds after starting the ROM, to simulate pressing and releasing the buttons on a real console.
Fixed bug when using event remapping; changes were being saved only when launching a ROM from the launcher, not in standalone mode.
Improved bankswitch autodetection for newer EF and EFSC ROMs generated by batari Basic, thanks to RevEng of AtariAge.
Added properties database info for "Princess Rescue" ROM.
Updated included PNG library to latest stable version.