SpiceWare's Blog - Jitter 3, Recovery Time

[RSS Bot]

Last time around I added jitter emulation to Stella, which became part of the official build with version 4.6.5. The jitter emulation basically moves the screen up/down in response to inconsistent scanline counts, similar to that which occurs on a real TV. I added it because people without an Atari would often write games with variable scanline counts, but not realize it until others play-tested the game on real hardware.

One thing it didn't emulate was a recovery time - if the difference in scanline counts is large a real TV will take multiple frames to recover. Instead, the original implementation would recover in just a single frame - blink and you might miss it.

TIA.hxx
Added a variable for recovery time:

 

 

TIA.cxx
Added a constant for the threshold for triggering recovery time. I went with 5, but it can easily be changed.

void TIA::initialize(){...  myNextFrameJitter = myCurrentFrameJitter = myJitterRecovery = 0;...}

Update the jitter logic to use the new variable and constant:

 

common/Version.hxx:


Jitter ROM:


Jitter Source:

 

 

 

If this looks good to y'all I'll submit the changes to stephena.

Attached thumbnail(s)

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Attached File(s)

• Stella Jitter Improvement.app.zip (3.48MB)
  Number of downloads: 0
• TIA source.zip (22.87KB)
  Number of downloads: 0
• Jitter.zip (19.91KB)
  Number of downloads: 0
• jitter.bin (2KB)
  Number of downloads: 0

http://atariage.com/forums/blog/148/entry-12666-jitter-3-recovery-time/