Slight stutter in happy face demo?

[gauauu]

Hi, I'm a newbie here -- just starting to investigate this awesome and insane world of 2600 programming.

 

After reading through all the tutorials I could find (particularly Andrew Davie's and Kirk Israel's), to sanity check everything, I've been compiling (I guess assembling?) all the sample code and running it. I've noticed that in all the computer's I've tested on, (running Stella) the happy face demo from Kirk's tutorial has a very slight stutter to it -- if I'm moving the character around, I get a slight twitch or stutter about once per second.

 

I'm trying to figure out if that's just an artifact of the computers/emulators I'm using, or if there's something in the code that's causing an issue?

 

(I'm aware of the sprite timing issues he mentions in that article, where he doesn't draw the first line of the sprite soon enough on the scanline, but I don't think that should cause the stutter that I'm talking about?)

 

The more I look at it, I think there's a good chance it's my emulator, but wanted to make sure I'm not starting off with problematic code as I'm learning.

 

Thanks!

[+Random Terrain]

The more I look at it, I think there's a good chance it's my emulator, but wanted to make sure I'm not starting off with problematic code as I'm learning.

Are you using the latest version of Stella?

 

stella.sourceforge.net

[gauauu]

No, turns out I'm using 3.7.2 (it's the version in the apt repository for my linux distro -- looks like installing 4 is going to have some dependencies which will be pretty difficult to resolve with my current setup.)

 

Based on your suggestion, I managed to dig up another machine (running windows), installed Stella 4, and the stutter is gone. So I guess it was either an issue with the 3 machines I tried it on previously, or a difference in the version of the emulator.

 

Thanks!