Stella 2.4.2 Linux version is crashing

[theodorecraig]

I am using Ubuntu Gusty Gibbon (Ubuntu 7.10) with Stella 2.4.2 and am having the following issue with it.

 

When I load a rom and play it for awhile it locks up Stella (i.e. the game just freezes/stops working) and I have to do a force quit to get Stella to close when not in full screen mode. In full screen mode I am not able to get the program to stop running to get back to the desktop, and I do not know how to force quit without being able to see/use the force quit button, and thus am forced to do a hard reboot of my computer. It seems to happens at random time intervals, and, with a lot of different roms.

 

Am I the only one having this problem with Stella 2.4.2 under Ubuntu 7.10?

Is this something I can fix?

Do I need to stop using Stella completely and use something that works with Linux better, and, if so what would that be?

 

Any help I can get will be appreciated.

[+stephena]

I am using Ubuntu Gusty Gibbon (Ubuntu 7.10) with Stella 2.4.2 and am having the following issue with it.

 

When I load a rom and play it for awhile it locks up Stella (i.e. the game just freezes/stops working) and I have to do a force quit to get Stella to close when not in full screen mode. In full screen mode I am not able to get the program to stop running to get back to the desktop, and I do not know how to force quit without being able to see/use the force quit button, and thus am forced to do a hard reboot of my computer. It seems to happens at random time intervals, and, with a lot of different roms.

 

Am I the only one having this problem with Stella 2.4.2 under Ubuntu 7.10?

Is this something I can fix?

Do I need to stop using Stella completely and use something that works with Linux better, and, if so what would that be?

 

Any help I can get will be appreciated.

Well, obviously this isn't normal behaviour. But I personally use Kubuntu 7.10 (64-bit) for development of Stella, and I've never heard of this problem. Testing in Win32 (XP and Vista) and OSX has never caused this issue either. So until we can get more feedback from many different people, I suspect there may be a problem on your side. Do you have any other games or emulators that use the SDL library? If so, how are they acting? Are you by chance using OpenGL mode with ATI hardware (I find that ATI support in Linux isn't great)??

[theodorecraig]

I actually do have other games that use the SDL library, as, I remembered that being installed; so, I did a search for it in the Synaptic Package Manager and noticed that there are several different "flavors" of it available for install. I noticed that libsdl1.2debian-alsa, Simple DirectMedia Layer (with X11 and ALSA options), was the one currently installed; so, I marked the one above it, which is libsdl1.2debian-all, Simple DirectMedia Layer (with all available options), and it removed that other one when it installed. I will test that and see if it makes any difference at all. I have several games that are x11 installed, so, it probably chose that package because of that; but, I would rather play the 2600 roms than those games. I will report back later with an update on how it is working. Thank you for your help.