Stella 5.0 released

[DirtyHairy]

After only few hours of installing, rebooting, and configuring, on the 3rd build attempt it started and succeeded in seconds!

 

I love the sound and the added subtle "light" selection for the GUI.

 

Thanks a lot for the feedback! There will be an official beta soon.

 

The new audio core required some very invasive changes in the way Stella's scheduling loop works, most notable the introduction of threading to decouple emulation timing from the interaction with the OS video system (which may block when a frame is rendered). As a side effect, timing has greatly improved; emulation should now run at almost the same speed as the real console for all games. I was able to run Pick'n'Pile (a particularly nasty test case that generates an irregular video signal) in parallel in Stella and on my VCS, and both played happily along in tune for a minute or so

[+stephena]

Many additional thanks for Stella!

 

After only few hours of installing, rebooting, and configuring, on the 3rd build attempt it started and succeeded in seconds!

 

...

 

On the 3rd build attempt it succeeded in a few seconds!

 

Good to hear that it worked out. And for anyone else that is interested, a lot of this is documented on the Stella development page (how to set up the compiler, brief intro to git, etc):

https://stella-emu.github.io/development.html

[Keatah]

Gotta love the ongoing work that's going into this project.

[jc13]

I know this may be a long shot, but I figured it was worth an ask if there were any other Mac users around... I am running Stella 5.1.3 on a Mac with a touch bar (High Sierra) and was trying to use BetterTouchTool to give me context appropriate buttons on the touch bar while Stella was running. This seems to work with the exception of start and select. Since I wasn't sure if it was the BetterTouchTool product that was having the problem, I took that out of the equation and wrote an AppleScript to send the key codes to Stella and got the same result. Is there something specific to the way the start and select keys are processed as opposed to the ones like color/bw or difficulty? I tried remapping select and start to keys other than F1 and F2 and still got nowhere. Just seems kind of strange. I also ran into nearly the same thing with Altirra in Wine - Start, Select and Option don't work there either (and I apologize for the crosspost in the A8 Altirra forum)... Anyway, the example to send F1 (mapped to Select) is below if someone else with a Mac wants to give it a go.

 

tell application "Stella" to activate

tell application "System Events" to key code 122

Edited August 5, 2018 by jc13

[+stephena]

Stella needs to eventually receive a 'key release' event too. Otherwise it thinks you've pressed and held the Select/Reset button.

 

I suspect Altirra and other similar emulators have the same requirement.

[jc13]

I believe that sending the key code does that by default, but just to test I tried:

 

tell application "Stella" to activate

tell application "System Events" to key down (key code 122)

delay 0.25

tell application "System Events" to key up (key code 122)

And still no luck - just seems to be the select and reset though...

[+stephena]

Where are you getting the keycodes from? Because for Stella, Select is F1 (scancode 58) and Reset is F2 (scancode 59). See https://github.com/stella-emu/stella/blob/master/src/common/StellaKeys.hxx.

[jc13]

I'm getting them from here: https://eastmanreference.com/complete-list-of-applescript-key-codes

 

They work for everything I've tested with the exception of start, select, and fry. I'm not sure why these codes are different from the normal scan codes...

[jc13]

I know I'm beating a dead horse here, but just to add a little more info... In the gui the TouchBar button I have configured for Frying sends the backspace code correctly (if I type in the search bar, "Fry" backspaces over the text) - but once the emulator starts, the same softkey isn't processed. Not sure why this is bugging me so much - I just want to TouchBar on the Mac to be useful for something!

Edited August 6, 2018 by jc13

[jc13]

Stella needs to eventually receive a 'key release' event too. Otherwise it thinks you've pressed and held the Select/Reset button.

 

I suspect Altirra and other similar emulators have the same requirement.

 

Bringing closure to this... stephena got me on the right track (thanks!) and I got this to work by adding mappings in Stella for select and reset to the modifier keys option and command. The reason for those particular keys is that the up and down methods only work with modifier keys (you can use control too) in AppleScript.

 

tell application "System Events" to tell process "Stella"

key down {option}

key up {option}

end tell