I broke Stella?

[yuppicide]

I was running 2.7.2. I have Visual bAtari Basic installed and make some games and test them. I also play others.

 

I fired up the game I am working on in VBB and had it run in Stella. The gameplay was weird. It was laggy for lack of a better term. It would do 3 or 4 frames fine, then 3 or 4 really fast, then 3 or 4 fine, etc, etc. Am I explaining that right? Like a few frames of play seems normal, then a few in fast motion, then a few normal.

 

So, I deleted the config files. Last time I remember someone here telling me to do that when I had a different issue. That didn't help.

 

I've uninstalled it and reinstalled 2.7.3. Still same problem. Happens in all games I try.

 

I have XP MCE, 1GB memory, and a dual core processor from AMD. I looked and see my CPU utilization is at 1% up to maybe 24% total.

 

When I'm playing my older game I was working on it plays full screen. When I'm trying my new game all of the sudden it plays in a tiny screen. I mean, it's in full screen mode, but the game itself is very tiny. It normally played in full screen for me.

[SeaGtGruff]

I was running 2.7.2. I have Visual bAtari Basic installed and make some games and test them. I also play others.

 

I fired up the game I am working on in VBB and had it run in Stella. The gameplay was weird. It was laggy for lack of a better term. It would do 3 or 4 frames fine, then 3 or 4 really fast, then 3 or 4 fine, etc, etc. Am I explaining that right? Like a few frames of play seems normal, then a few in fast motion, then a few normal.

 

So, I deleted the config files. Last time I remember someone here telling me to do that when I had a different issue. That didn't help.

 

I've uninstalled it and reinstalled 2.7.3. Still same problem. Happens in all games I try.

 

I have XP MCE, 1GB memory, and a dual core processor from AMD. I looked and see my CPU utilization is at 1% up to maybe 24% total.

 

When I'm playing my older game I was working on it plays full screen. When I'm trying my new game all of the sudden it plays in a tiny screen. I mean, it's in full screen mode, but the game itself is very tiny. It normally played in full screen for me.

I've seen that sort of behavior before, but it wasn't Stella per se, it was the computer I was using. Basically, something was running in the background that was using up a lot of CPU cycles every so often, and Stella would slow down momentarily. Then, whenever Stella had a chance to use more CPU cycles, it would briefly run faster so it could "catch up" to where it was supposed to be as far as the frame timing-- i.e., until it drew the number of frames that should have been drawn in that amount of time. If that's what's happening to you, you might see if something else is running on your computer while you're playing Stella-- possibly something that was just installed fairly recently, or something that was always there but its settings got changed recently.

 

Michael

 

Edit: PS-- Sometimes simply rebooting your computer works wonders, so you might try that.

Edited March 26, 2009 by SeaGtGruff

[+stephena]

I agree with SeaGtGruff; it's probably something you've installed on the computer recently, or a virus/scanner that is bogging the system down.

 

You almost never have to uninstall Stella. Uninstalling and reinstalling does absolutely nothing, unless the application itself has been infected by a virus (which is very rare, and in any event would cause Stella not to run at all). Deleting your settings is what caused the game to be very small in fullscreen mode. You have to adjust the Video Settings to take care of that.

 

Stella is actually a very undemanding program on most systems. If it was working fine for a period of time and all of a sudden stops working or slows down, I would strongly suspect something else is wrong on your system. Put another way, I really think it's impossible for you to 'break' Stella. If you don't change the settings at all, then it will work the same as always.

[yuppicide]

Will see how things run when I get home tonight. Thanks.

[yuppicide]

Yeah, no luck. Nothing has changed in my system other than my Girlfriend playing the game Singles 2 (sim-like game). I have all the same programs on startup, and 224GB hard drive space free. I'd say I'd send you a .bin of my game to test, but it does it on all games.

 

I can't figure out why my old Acid Fish runs in full screen fine, I run at 1680x1050 on widescreen, yet my new game won't show that large. It's only in a tiny window.

Edited March 26, 2009 by yuppicide

[+stephena]

Yeah, no luck. Nothing has changed in my system other than my Girlfriend playing the game Singles 2 (sim-like game). I have all the same programs on startup, and 224GB hard drive space free. I'd say I'd send you a .bin of my game to test, but it does it on all games.

 

I can't figure out why my old Acid Fish runs in full screen fine, I run at 1680x1050 on widescreen, yet my new game won't show that large. It's only in a tiny window.

For the small game image in the middle of a large fullscreen mode, try pressing 'Alt =' to increase the zoom level to see what happens.

 

As for the other ROM being slow, yes, you can send it to me to test. What you experience as 'slowness' could be something with the ROM itself or how it's being emulated.

[yuppicide]

Well, I defragged my hard drive, that's not it.

 

The ALT= worked to make the one game larger, even though I have my video settings at 5x.

 

But as far as that slowdown/speed up thing right now I am clueless. I'm watching my CPU usage right now and the most it has gotten is 8%.

[yuppicide]

I think I may have found the problem. Now, why all of the sudden this started happening is beyond me. I found out the problem by accident.

 

I had just went in to try some fooling around with settings again in Stella. I hit a button and the menu was off the screen! I couldn't get it back on. The only way I could figure out to get it back on was to unlock the Windows Taskbar so I could get rid of it, then I could see the menu. I hit Options and turned off full screen. Then fixed my taskbar.

 

The game ran fine in Windowed mode!

 

So, then I went back to full screen and turned down the resolution from 1680x1050 to lower. As I went lower I noticed performance getting better. I had to go all the way down to 800x600 for it to work as good as it used to.

 

It's weird it just started happening because I've been running this same setup for awhile with no troubles.. 22" LCD in 1680x1050 mode. I know my graphics card is kind of crappy (cost me about $50) but I needed a cheap HD card. It runs my war game (Combat Arms.. sort of like Call of Duty, but free) just fine.

 

Maybe I should have left the resolution thing on AUTO rather than manually change it? Because I just tried OpenGL mode, which I guess I don't have. I restarted Stella and all that came up was a red background and cursor. I had to CTRL-ALT-DEL to end task and get out. So, I deleted the cfg file and went back in and left it on auto, which works fine.

[+stephena]

I think I may have found the problem. Now, why all of the sudden this started happening is beyond me. I found out the problem by accident.

 

I had just went in to try some fooling around with settings again in Stella. I hit a button and the menu was off the screen! I couldn't get it back on. The only way I could figure out to get it back on was to unlock the Windows Taskbar so I could get rid of it, then I could see the menu. I hit Options and turned off full screen. Then fixed my taskbar.

 

The game ran fine in Windowed mode!

 

So, then I went back to full screen and turned down the resolution from 1680x1050 to lower. As I went lower I noticed performance getting better. I had to go all the way down to 800x600 for it to work as good as it used to.

 

It's weird it just started happening because I've been running this same setup for awhile with no troubles.. 22" LCD in 1680x1050 mode. I know my graphics card is kind of crappy (cost me about $50) but I needed a cheap HD card. It runs my war game (Combat Arms.. sort of like Call of Duty, but free) just fine.

 

Maybe I should have left the resolution thing on AUTO rather than manually change it? Because I just tried OpenGL mode, which I guess I don't have. I restarted Stella and all that came up was a red background and cursor. I had to CTRL-ALT-DEL to end task and get out. So, I deleted the cfg file and went back in and left it on auto, which works fine.

It's best to experiment with the largest fullscreen mode that your computer can comfortably run. For you it seems to be 800x600. That's fine, but I suggest you write this down somewhere so that if you ever lose your settings again, you know exactly what to do next time.

 

The red screen with OpenGL occurs with ATI video cards. I'll bet this is what you have, correct? I'll be doing a quick bugfix release in the next few days that takes care of that problem for good.

Edited March 27, 2009 by stephena

[+stephena]

Maybe I should have left the resolution thing on AUTO rather than manually change it? Because I just tried OpenGL mode, which I guess I don't have. I restarted Stella and all that came up was a red background and cursor. I had to CTRL-ALT-DEL to end task and get out. So, I deleted the cfg file and went back in and left it on auto, which works fine.

The 'red screen' issue is a bug in the ATI OpenGL drivers. I've just done a 2.7.5 release that addresses that issue, so please download it and try OpenGL mode again. If you can get OpenGL mode working, it's generally much better than software mode. You could then set your fullscreen resolution to maximum (1680x1050) and let OpenGL scale the image for you to that size. This would be quite fast, as the video card would be doing the scaling (vs. software mode where Stella itself is doing the scaling).

[+Random Terrain]

Maybe that's the answer for capturing Stella videos for YouTube. Go down to 800 x 600 and maybe Stella won't have little speed problems here and there. Still wish there were more people using Stella and CamStudio so that maybe someone would figure out the best settings, including Blend:

 

http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=140728