PAL color-loss in Stella emulator

[maiki]

I was playing with famous 32 in 1 ROM in Stella and noticed that quite a lot of games like Ufo (Space Jockey) or Fishing lose color in Stella, whereas they are perfectly colorful on my real PAL Atari 2600 Jr and CRT TV. All standard unmodified RF. So at least compared to my setup, Stella is not emulating the output correctly :-).

 

 

As for the Fishing on real system and TV, there is actually a flicker in the sky portion but the rest is still colorful without changes.

Edited January 3, 2012 by maiki

[+stephena]

I would guess it's because the ROM you're using has games that sometimes have an odd number of scanlines. On such a PAL ROM, the video will change to black and white. This emulation can be disabled in Options -> Video Settings -> PAL color-loss. Can you provide the ROM you're using? The one I have doesn't contain any odd-scanline games, so the color-loss effect doesn't happen anyway.

 

BTW, PAL emulation in Stella is probably not entirely accurate. I don't have access to a PAL system (or TV), and have never actually seen one at all. So it's not surprising that the emulation is weaker in this area.

[maiki]

In Stella I am using the following ROM:

 

http://www.atariage.com/software_page.html?SoftwareLabelID=899

 

 

On real Atari I am using the cartridge that came with it. They should be the same.

 

Without a PAL system it is hard to observe the output. I might try to capture that somehow but I do not even have a capture card.

[maiki]

I tried to capture the Fishing. Please ignore the flicker of the camera. But it clearly shows how the sky is divided when you start the game. The upper portion is sort of blue / b&w and the rest in normal colors.