Stella Breakdances at Gdansk demo scene party

[Mr SQL]

 

We switched to Stella in Gdansk this year instead of real Atari hardware and my 4-in 1 demo began break dancing in Stella which was very interesting, but more Stella's "machine art" frying my programs. Perhaps the code triggered the feature to fry the ROM's  

 

 Because of uneven performance in Stella with steep hardware requirements on machines that could otherwise run the older Z26 emulator written in Assembly at full speed it may be better to use the older emu, we had tested on real hardware with a Harmony cart like we used last time but there was a change to emulation this year.

 

Here's Stella falling apart rendering because it cannot keep up with the display; this demo uses a classic Television threading model to saturate a classic Television with code. Z26 and Javatari can run it at full speed along with my older version of Stella. I saw similar performance issues on older machines running Gopher emulation previously but have not tested with the latest version of Gopher which is faster:

 

Silly Venture 2021 4-in 1 MBR Demo Party in Gdansk! - Atari 2600 - AtariAge Forums

 

Idea for Stella Development: With all the new enhancements to Stella adding extra overhead, one idea may be to do a performance check on the system and transparently switch in the Z26 core if it is too slow for Stella since they share the same codebase and Z26 is lightning fast.

 

The perf checker would keep the emulator from suddenly breaking like this from uneven performance on a subset of machines; since enhancements are continually added to the codebase and users download the latest versions the perf checker might be the only way to avoid this.