• Improved illegal CPU instruction support. Thrust and Qb will now operate correctly.
• Improved emulation of undefined TIA reads. The ball in Video Pinball finally bounces off of the paddles!
• More accurate NTSC and PAL palettes. These palettes should be much more like the colors displayed on a real TV.
• PAL color loss is now emulated. If a PAL game displays an odd number of scanlines then the next frame will be displayed in black & white.
• TIA emulation improved to fix some problems with Pole Position, Fatal Run, Dolphin, Decathlon, Robot Tank, and Hole Hunter.
• Support for Pitfall II has been added, however, the enhanced sound provided by the DPC chip found in the Pitfall II cartridge isn't currently emulated.
• Support added for the Commavid (CV) bankswitching method.
• Support added for the Megaboy cartridge.
• Improved Supercharger emulation including a new BIOS that shows the vertical blue progress bars like the real thing.
• Code for the emulation core has been updated to work with newer C++ compilers compliant with the C++ standard.
• Basic message support added to the TIA emulation. This allows a short message to overlay the TIA frame. Currently, it's used when switching color modes and difficulty settings.
• The internal data structure for the stella.pro file was changed from a resizable array to a binary search tree. This results in quicker startup times.
• An SDL port of Stella is available (requires SDL 1.2.0 or greater)
• Added option to not load in the whole stella.pro file when starting Stella. This option is enabled on the X11, SDL, and DOS versions. Win32 version is left alone since it's needed for loading multiple games from the UI. Saves on memory usage.
• Added INI file option to the X11 and SDL versions. Options can be specified in this file instead of entering them on the commandline. Any options entered on the commandline override options in the INI file. File is called stellarc. For the X11 and SDL versions, it can be in either $HOME (as $HOME/.stellarc) or in /etc (as /etc/stellarc). The one in $HOME has higher priority than the one in /etc.
• Added snapshot support to the X11 and SDL versions. Pressing F12 saves the current screen in PNG format. Requires PNG library.
• Removed stella.pro file from the binary, resulting in large space savings. The stella.pro file is no longer optional. For the X11 and SDL versions, it can be in either $HOME (as $HOME/.stella.pro) or in /etc (as /etc/stella.pro). The one in $HOME has higher priority than the one in /etc. For DOS and Win32 versions, the stella.pro file must be in the same directory as the executable.
• Added pause functionality to the core. Implemented in DOS, X11, and SDL versions for now.