Stella 3.9.3 released

[+stephena]

It's time for a new release of Stella. First of all, I apologize for being away so long. I've been dealing with an illness for the past 3 months, and am only now starting to get back into the swing of things.

 

This is a quick bugfix release based on the old 3.9 code (I'm currently working on what will become Stella 4.0). It includes new bankswitch schemes and a few bugfixes, thanks to several members here on AtariAge. Changes are as follows:

* Added bankswitch schemes BF, BFSC, DF, DFSC and 4KSC, thanks to RevEng and CPUWIZ of AtariAge.

* Updated ROM properties for several ROMs, thanks to Omegamatrix of AtariAge.

* Fixed program crash when specifying a bankswitch type that Stella didn't recognize; an error message is now displayed.

 

As usual, Stella can be downloaded from the Stella homepage. Donations are of course welcome, as is feedback in this thread or by PM.

[Keatah]

I love these aperiodic updates. With a little bit of imagination it feels like I took my VCS into the shop for a PM cleaning and firmware update.

[+Nathan Strum]

Thanks for your continued work on Stella! Sorry to hear about your illness - hope you're well-rested and recover soon.

[israelg]

Thanks !!!

[RevEng]

Thanks stephena!

[Buzbard]

Thanks stephena, it's always good to see that this project hasn't died off.

 

When I downloaded the file Norton Antivirus reported that the file was unsafe and qurentined it.

I ran it through Virus Total and nothing was found using 48 virus scanners.

I think it was just a reputation thing that NAV uses.

All seems to be working fine.

 

Thanks again.

[+stephena]

For the Windows port, I use a Windows 7 virtual machine (VirtualBox). On a fairly regular basis, I do a full antivirus scan on this, and it's the only thing I use the VM for. So it's highly unlikely to be from my end, but not impossible of course.

 

Also, I've noticed that some antivirus products tend to mark anything downloaded from sourceforge.net as being a virus. This has personally happened to me with other types of software, but none of them ever contained a virus either.

[TwiliteZoner]

Take care of yourself and thanks again for all the work.

[Nerf Herder73]

Thank you very much! No update is worth compromising your health. Take care.

[NightSprinter]

Stephen, have you been in contact with the package maintainer for Arch Linux? The package available seems to continue to require an older version of libpng that has been obsoleted.

[+stephena]

I haven't heard anything about the Arch issue. Stella includes the latest libpng directly in the codebase, so that can be used instead, to eliminate any external requirements. Also, Stella compiles against both the old version (1.2.x) and the newer ones (1.5, 1.6), so this is likely an issue with the build environment used by the Arch package maintainer.

[+TwentySixHundred]

Brilliant thanks for the hard work over the years

[NightSprinter]

Thanks for the update on that, Stephen. I'll go let the package maintainer over on the Arch forums know what's going on. Until then, I can compile manually.

[+SpiceWare]

The list view icon appears to be missing:

 

 

I'm working on Frantic and was wondering if there's a way in the debugger to see the contents of the Display Data and Frequency RAM? I thought possibly using the DUMP command, with an address larger than FFFF, might work but no such luck

 

Thanks!

[Mr SQL]

Stephena,

I've come across a SuperCharger bank switching difference with the real hardware. Details and an example file are on this thread:

 

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/221197-sprites-stuck-on-supercharger/?do=findComment&comment=2920848

[Keatah]

A feature request and suggestion:

 

With some rom names becoming stupid long I think we need a wrap-around feature someplace. Perhaps on the right side, the info section. Or perhaps do it explorer style when hovering over the rom name. Have it pop up with complete name.

 

Instead of displaying the path at the bottom, display it at the top. Get rid of the "select an item from the list ..." that's kind of redundant. And then at the bottom, display the selected rom name, in full, in a lighter green text.

 

What do you think?

 

 

I'm aware I could use a widescreen 16:10 monitor, and disable the rom viewer, or shrink the font size. But...

Edited February 27, 2014 by Keatah

[enthusi]

I think the path doesnt have to be displayed at all?

[Csonicgo]

I'm attempting to compile stella on the Raspberry Pi. Looks like the debugger and the cheat functions do not compile, and gets stuck on AtariVox.cpp. Looks to be a GCC bug.

 

Edit: nevermind. it's just "Working" now. I guess I shouldn't overclock so much.

Edited April 10, 2014 by Csonicgo

[+SpiceWare]

* Added bankswitch schemes BF, BFSC, DF, DFSC and 4KSC, thanks to RevEng and CPUWIZ of AtariAge.

 

@RevEng or @CPUWIZ ^*

 

During my lunch break I was working on implementing the Cartridge RAM Tab for additional cartridge types that contain extra RAM. Are there any test ROMs available for these new BFSC, DFSC and 4KSC formats?

 

Thanks!

 

 

^* (I'm hoping the "MEMBER" BBCode will send y'all a notification )

[RevEng]

No notification fanciness, but stella update threads always catch my interest.

 

Here are the tests I originally sent stephena.

 

4KSC_test.bin

DFSC_128k_ramtest.bin

BFSC_256k_ramtest.bin

[+SpiceWare]

4KSC

 

DFSC

 

BFSC

 

Have four left to do. One I can't find a ROM to test with, while the other three are implemented but results don't match what's in the upper RAM display.

• CTY - can't find a test ROM
• 3E - using BoulderDash100
• E7 - using BurgerTime
• CM - using CompuMate

 

Hmm - think I just figured out why those 3 don't match the upper RAM display. Looks like the "RAM display" really shows whatever's banked into the "RAM Read address range" in the cartridge port's 4K window. For some cartridge types that can be ROM.

Edited April 15, 2014 by SpiceWare