Buzbard

For me it still is, kinda, my ISP provides it for free. So, I guess I can't really complain.

Had a helluva time just downloading 5.0.2, Norton Antivirus would delete it before I could do anything with it. Kept reporting a "Heur.AdvMLC" virus, turns out it's just low reputation because there's not much community usage yet. I got it sorted and working fine. Thanks for all the hard work on this release, very much appreciated!

Are these compatible with the original Atari 400/800? If so, I'd like one as well.

Just picked up a Atari 800 and the cartridge cover/door is broken, so it won't stay closed and it won't push the safety switch for power-on. If anyone has a spare for sale or trade (I have lots of extra 2600 carts) let me know please.

Nice work, I always look forward to Stella updates! I'm using Windows 7, so I had a bit a hiccup since MSVCP140.dll was missing, but installing the "Microsoft Visual C++ 2015 Redistributable Update 3" did the trick, just scroll down a little over half way and you'll see it.

Awesome, as usual! Now I don't have to reach for the keyboard to toggle difficulty. Thank you! Why would anyone want to uninstall Stella?? (mind-boggling)

Request: Can you add (in input settings) a way to toggle B/W & Color, Player0 Difficulty and Player1 Difficulty? It would be easier for gamepads (I think) if we didn't have to program 2 buttons for each. (My gamepad doesn't have that many buttons anyway. ) I'm not asking to remove the old settings just add toggles. Thanks

Thanks Stephen, updates are always appreciated. Stella just keeps getting better!

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.

Better grab hold of something solid! http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-8/preview

I've checked it again, it says "FIRE BIRD" in top label, I overlooked the space, no further info available. The game itself doesn't look like Megamania, it has several blue birds flying in different lines shooting the magenta ship in bottom, when a bird is destroyed it "regenerates" from left and right of screen, when the ship is destroyed it explodes like fireworks. Your description of "Fire Bird" sounds like Demon Attack to me.

Found this one at atariguide.com. It's not perfect but could be Photoshopped!

Click: Disk/Open and select the drive to sort. Next to the third and fourth icons is a down-arrow, click each down-arrow and make sure Subdirectories is checked. Click Folder/Sort. Click Folder/Save Lastly click Disk/Close. All your folders/files should now be sorted.

It wasn't my intention to place blame solely on the end users, my main PC is also quite old, and as long as it does what I need it to do, I'll continue to use it. If you decide to modify Stella to the point that my PC is no longer sufficient, then it will give me the excuse to upgrade, and I'm looking forward to seeing how Stella will evolve.

Back in the mid 90s, when Windows 95 was just released, a friend of mine who had an old 386 computer, I believe it was only 16Mhz, really wanted Win95 on his machine. So, I went to his house and installed Win95 on his very slow machine, it took hours to install. And when finally finished installing, it ran super slow. I told him that he really needed a new computer, at least a 486 33Mhz but he just wasn't willing to upgrade, and he still wanted Win95. I finally had to just step back and tell him that it wasn't going to work the way he wanted it to. I think maybe it's time to do the same with software rendering and just move on to OpenGL, and if some people have problems with that then it's time for an upgrade. Not only you, but everyone else who uses Stella are being held back by these stubborn people who are unwilling to move in to the 21st century. As far as anyone saying that Stella does not have 100% perfect emulation, all that can really be said to them is, if you want your games to run 100% perfect, "USE REAL HARDWARE!!!" I don't believe any emulator can run with 100% accuracy, that's why it's called emulation. If z26 is so much more accurate, then why are emulators for other systems, (PSP, XBox, Wii, PS2, etc..) based on Stella? As others have said in this thread, Stella is the default emulator, on all of my machines. I have used z26, and other emulators in the past, but in my opinion, none of them can really compare to Stella. Thanks stephena for all of your hard work over the years on this great project.

There is a way to save high scores in MAME, but it requires that you compile it yourself. First you'll need the tools to compile it, they are here. Along with instructions. Then you'll need the current source code and any update patches that are available, located here. And you'll also need the latest hiscore.diff patch by MKChamp located here. After applying all patches and compiling, you'll then need the latest hiscore.dat file, you can get an unofficial one here. I would upload the latest build here but it's almost 50 megs compressed. Good Luck!

You can get the highscore.diff file @ Build Your Own Arcade Controls Forum. The same patch also allows you to disable the NAG screen and the Loading screen.

Accessing $1000-$107F will store to RAM whatever happens to be sitting on the bus. Some EEPROM readers pull the data pins down weakly; Harmony has a weak pullup on D6. If one were to read $1080-$10FF before accessing $1000-$107F, one would probably get random data. In any case, the RAM values aren't important. I tried to run my dumps of Dig Dig and those of AJs and none of them will run in Stella as-is, but if I change (with a hex editor) the first 256 bytes of each 4k section to either all $00 of all $FF then Stella runs them without problems. I haven't tried to run those dumps from Harmony yet. UPDATE: The dumps do not work on the Harmony, the Dig Dug logo is displayed without any animated characters, but when reset or the fire button is pressed the game screen is displayed but it's hozed, and the system hangs. They do work after I change all the RAM bytes to all $00 though.

I have Dig Dug, I dumped it using auto & forced and they came out the same but they are different from the available version. digdug.bin It looks like certain bytes in the first 255 bytes of each 4k chunk has $40 added to them. (if that makes sense)

Ok, v.93 didn't fix it, it's still mirroring block 0 to blocks 1 & 2 but block 3 is ok. (Miner 2049er) EDIT: That is when I select 3F instead of autodetect. Autodetect works fine though. Autodetect also works fine with Robot Tank, but not when FE is selected.

I also have Miner 2049er(NTSC) I used v.92 autodetect 3 times and got good dumps every time, but if i select 3F I get a bad dump every time which turned out the same as Omegamatrix described above: block 0 is duplicated to blocks 1 and 2 but block 3 is ok. The good dumps also match the good dump in Rom's collection. It's the white Tigervision cart if that helps any, (I don't know if there are any others)

Here's program I wrote a while back, it should run in Windows'95 and above, it was written using Visual Basic 6. ROM Splitter.zip

No, there's no confusion, I completely understand that Robot Tank is an FE cart, that's why I couldn't get a workable dump because I was trying to dump it as an F8. What really confused me, is after dumping it, I ran it through Stella and it reported it as a PAL cart, I don't have any PAL carts! It's similar to the [hMF8] version that's floating around, just displays "Switching to reserve tank" on a rolling screen.

Yes, that's where it hung-up, but it only did it once. After that I just waited until the countdown to apply power to the dump cart. Yeah, I was looking through sizes.txt (attached) for an Activision F8 cart to try and it lists Robot Tank as an F8: Robot Tank AZ-028 R 8 F8 X X2 J ROBO_FIX but right below that section (which I didn't see at first) it states: X2: This used to be an FE cart, but has been fixed to run as an F8. Which is why I was temporarily confused. sizes.txt

Nice job guys, I just tried out the last version, had very few hang-ups. I dumped Combat, Defender, both versions of Asteroids and Commando, I don't have any F4 carts, so I can't test that. I tried Robot Tank and I couldn't get it to work then I finally discovered (according to sizes.txt) that it's a FE cart that's been fixed to run as a F8, no wonder it didn't work.