Stella/2
I recently did an podcast that was simulcast on Retro Bliss Gaming and Mike's Gaming Gala. At the beginning I talk about how I'd stopped playing Atari in the early 80s because of computers (my first was a VIC 20 in December 1981) and that I got back to the Atari by porting Stella to OS/2. I typically refer to my port as Stella/2.
I saw this user comment on Mike's simulcast:
and wanted to address it, but I no longer have a YouTube account so am replying to it here. Perhaps tarstarkusz will see it.
Stella was on the scene at least a few years before 2000 as I joined the Stella team in the mid-to-late 90s. I didn't recall exactly when, so I did some research.
I remembered there was a review of an early version in OS/2 e-Zine. The site's long gone, but I found the review via Wayback Machine. Clicking the home link on the bottom-right reveals the review was published in Volume 2, Number 5 on May 16, 1997.
Screenshots of the review in case Wayback Machine goes offline again.
A few things I noticed in the review:
- it's for Stella v0.61
- my email address used to be spice@ibm.net, at the time I accessed the internet using IBM's OS/2 Warp Internet Access Kit.
- my GeoCities address was SiliconValley/Pines/2281 (archive at Wayback Machine)
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review has links to a number of screenshots, such as Space Invaders:
I then found this site which has a couple versions of my port of Stella available:
- stella070.zip - version 0.7
- stella11.zip - version 1.1
Both contain a file called stella.inf, which is an OS/2 Help file. I was able to view them on my Mac by downloading the Windows program iview and running it via Whisky.
Contents of help file from version 1.1, Stella/2 Version History is at the bottom:
Top of Stella/2 Version History page:
Bottom of Stella/2 Version History page:
So my first release of Stella/2 was September 15, 1996, about a week before OS/2 Warp 4 was released.
Version 1.1 was my final release of Stella/2 as I'd switched to Mac OS X after a friend gave me an old PowerMac G3.
I was able to use iview to export the full version history of my port of Stella/2:
Stella_11_os2_version_history.txt
The stella070 archive also has a file called stella.txt which contains:
Stella is Copyright(c) 1995, 1996, 1997 by Bradford W. Mott.
So work on Stella started sometime in 1995. From here it was late 1995:
QuoteStella: A Multi-platform Atari 2600 Emulator
In late 1995, Dr. Mott started working on Stella, a multi-platform Atari 2600 emulator, to allow Atari 2600 games to be played on modern PCs running Linux. Since its original release, numerous people have contributed to porting the open source emulator to other platforms and have refined the code to create a highly accurate Atari 2600 emulator. Stella has seen active development for over twenty-five years. Stephen Anthony currently leads the development efforts on the open source project.
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