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Stella 6.5 released


stephena

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I dug up a PAL 6-switcher.  The behaviour on that is all the digits are jiggling left/right by about 3-4 pixels, and positioned right-of-centre on the screen. After a while, one set of 3 digits (P1?) appear to have stabilised in place - still right of centre. The P0 are a good ways shifted to the left of that. Say, 20 pixels.

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Follow-up. After about 5 minutes P0 stopped wobbling and stablised so that I now have a perfect-looking "100000" right-of-centre but all digits positioned perfectly and (mostly) stable. Well, I thought it was stable. Now just jiggling a bit but in the right position. PAL 6-switcher.

 

Edit: and now it's stable as a rock, but in three groups of two digits, the two-digits being squashed together.

Basically like my original picture of the JR result.

Edited by Andrew Davie
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Apart from the position right-of-centre this is pretty much what I would have expected.

 

What is going on is that in "starfield mode" the sprite counters keep getting movement pulses from the HMOVE logic every four clocks in addition to their regular pulses every clock. The phase and shape of those two pulses depends on the TIA revision, temperature (and probably moon phase and karma ?). Depending on this the extra pulses are either not counted at all (same phase), gobble up a regular pulse (same width, positioned between two regular pulses) or generate extra counter increments.

 

What Stella emulates is the case where they overlap exactly.

Edited by DirtyHairy
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And another follow up: acutally, we have a setting in Stella to switch the phase I was talking about to the other extreme (same width, positioned between two regular pulse). This option lurks on the "TIA" tab of the developer settings. If you check out the screenshot below, you can see that the result is pretty close to your Jrs.

 

I'll open a ticket to investigate the phase of the players a bit more closely, but I don't think it makes much sense to invest more time in to more "accurate" emulation here. The behavior is unstable, and we already cover two "benchmark" cases. The exact shapes of the player starfield is a different issue, I want to investigate that one. However, that's potentially a lot of work as there are many combinations of GRPx and NUSIZ, so no estimates ?

 

370342104_Bildschirmfoto2021-01-29um14_30_41.thumb.png.bc601b6fa755b580559db271581725b6.png1178770605_Bildschirmfoto2021-01-29um14_33_35.thumb.png.52d8d5c5c00a8e2cacccde567d042739.png

Edited by DirtyHairy
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On 1/9/2021 at 5:21 PM, stephena said:

There are now builds available for Ubuntu 18.04 (previous LTS) and also Raspberry Pi OS 3/4, generously contributed by @SvOlli.

Anyone has experience with the latest Stella on Raspberry PI? Which model will run all games at fullspeed with TV effects, scanlines and phosphor turned on at 1080p?

 

I tried installing the latest Stella on a old hp pavillon dv4000 laptop (it took over 30 minutes to compile!) and it plays Draconian (at 1280x800) with the above settings without any slowdown, but I don't know how it compares to a Raspberry.

 

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 1/9/2021 at 8:21 AM, stephena said:

So, it's time for the "Christmas" release of Stella.  Unfortunately, real life got in the way (as it sometimes does) and we missed the scheduled date.  As well, we weren't able to add all the things we were planning.  But enough apologizing, let's look at what was included.  Note that there were a lot of under-the-hood changes here, so even if the changelog looks relatively short, a lot of work/bugfixing was done.  One of the biggest new backend changes is moving the settings to an SQLite database.  Stella is getting much more complex, and having different settings (in different formats) all over the place was getting out of hand.  Another cool new feature is High Scores saving, even for ROMs that don't normally support it.  Finally, we extended the cut/copy/paste functionality in the UI a little further (more work to come).  So here's the changelog:

As usual, Stella can be downloaded at https://stella-emu.github.io/downloads.html, and donations are welcome at https://stella-emu.github.io/donations.html.  Note that we're still working out some last minute issues with the R77 port, so that one will come later this week.  Bugs can be reported here, or ideally by creating an issue at https://github.com/stella-emu/stella/issues.  Enjoy!

 

EDIT:  There are now builds available for Ubuntu 18.04 (previous LTS) and also Raspberry Pi OS 3/4, generously contributed by @SvOlli.  The download links have been updated accordingly.

Is there any flashback consume version that can take 6.5?

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  • 2 weeks later...

Stella 6.5.2 is now released, which fixes a few bugs mentioned from the previous pages.  Changelog as follows:

  • Fixed broken Driving Controller support for Stelladaptor/2600-daptor devices.
  • Fixed missing QuadTari option in UI.
  • Improved QuadTari timing.
  • Added CPU usage stats to ARM cart classes debug widgets.

As usual, Stella can be downloaded at https://stella-emu.github.io/downloads.html, and donations can be made at https://stella-emu.github.io/donations.html.  Please report any bugs in this thread or as an issue on Github at https://github.com/stella-emu/stella/issues.

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Thank you Stephen and the Stella team! :) 

 

One issue I'm having (and I had it in 6.5.1 also) is that when I hit ESC and ~ to view properties, my mouse pointer is not visible. :( I've reverted back to 6.3 temporarily since it's almost impossible to debug without the mouse cursor ;) and that works fine.  

 

Oh - another small issue but this may be user error:  when I run from the command line with -lc joystick -rc joystick, should that override the 'auto detect' feature?  When testing Lady Bug Arcade, it seems no matter what I specify in the command line, the QuadTari and SaveKey are always detected.  This seems to happen even in 6.3, although I'm almost certainly this worked at some point.

 

Any help/suggestions are welcome!

 

Thanks!

John

 

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18 minutes ago, johnnywc said:

Thank you Stephen and the Stella team! :) 

 

One issue I'm having (and I had it in 6.5.1 also) is that when I hit ESC and ~ to view properties, my mouse pointer is not visible. :( I've reverted back to 6.3 temporarily since it's almost impossible to debug without the mouse cursor ;) and that works fine.  

Have you checked "Mouse cursor visibility" in Options/Input Settings/Mouse?

 

18 minutes ago, johnnywc said:

Oh - another small issue but this may be user error:  when I run from the command line with -lc joystick -rc joystick, should that override the 'auto detect' feature?  When testing Lady Bug Arcade, it seems no matter what I specify in the command line, the QuadTari and SaveKey are always detected.  This seems to happen even in 6.3, although I'm almost certainly this worked at some point.

It should override auto detect, so that's a bug. I'll look into it.

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16 minutes ago, Thomas Jentzsch said:

Have you checked "Mouse cursor visibility" in Options/Input Settings/Mouse?

 

Yup, that was it!  PS Looks like the default is -UI/+Emulation; perhaps the default should be +UI/+Emulation?

16 minutes ago, Thomas Jentzsch said:

It should override auto detect, so that's a bug. I'll look into it.

Thanks TJ! :thumbsup:  

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26 minutes ago, Thomas Jentzsch said:
Quote

Oh - another small issue but this may be user error:  when I run from the command line with -lc joystick -rc joystick, should that override the 'auto detect' feature?  When testing Lady Bug Arcade, it seems no matter what I specify in the command line, the QuadTari and SaveKey are always detected.  This seems to happen even in 6.3, although I'm almost certainly this worked at some point.

It should override auto detect, so that's a bug. I'll look into it.

It tested with the attached ROM. Without any parameters, QuadTari is detected for both ports, with "-lc joystick -rc joystick" joysticks are detected in both ports. Can you double check your input, please?

witchtower.bin

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1 minute ago, Thomas Jentzsch said:

Should be "+UI/-Emulation". And according to my tests it is.

 

How did you get -UI/+Emulation as default?

I just installed 6.5.2 over my existing install and by default I couldn't see the cursor when I hit TAB or ~ when navigating the menus.  When I re-installed 6.3, the cursor was back. :? 

 

I can try it with a clean install and let you know how it goes.

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1 minute ago, Thomas Jentzsch said:

6.5 switched to a SQLite database for properties. So settings for 6.5 and versions before are independent.

Okay - that makes sense.  I think a clean install on my end is in order! 

 

4 minutes ago, Thomas Jentzsch said:

It tested with the attached ROM. Without any parameters, QuadTari is detected for both ports, with "-lc joystick -rc joystick" joysticks are detected in both ports. Can you double check your input, please?

witchtower.bin 32 kB · 0 downloads

Okay, that worked.  Not sure why when I run it through Textpad /Tools with the same command it doesn't override.  Must be my system/setup/environment... please disregard my "error" reports. ;)

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