stella-emu/stella 6.0

Stella 6.0 released

on GitHub

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• The 'launcherexts' option has been replaced by a true/false option named 'launcherroms', which specifies to show only ROMs or all files in the ROM launcher.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.