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Stella 6.4 released


stephena

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On 11/5/2020 at 10:35 PM, DirtyHairy said:

Unfortunately, there is not much that can be done about the scanlines (apart from disabling them). The emulated TV displays around 250 lines. With scanline emulation enabled, this is doubled to around 500 lines. The R77 runs at 720p, so those 500 lines have to be scaled vertically to 720 lines, and that causes a slight moirée pattern. Disabling aspect ratio correction will give you integer scaling only, but the price are black bars and an aspect ratio that does not match a real TV. I have done some experiments with 1080p on the R77 (which produces much nicer scaling), but the GPU cannot sustain 60FPS and causes frame drops.

It's worth noting that lowering the intensity of scanlines, makes the moirée pattern much less visible. I use 8% scanline intensity even when playing at 1080p resolution (I don't have a R77, but I use a PC permanently hooked to my living room TV), altought at that resolution the scaling shows no artifacts with higher scanlines intensity. The resulting image is brighter, which I like, but scanlines still add a nice texture to the display.
I prefer to keep the aspect ratio correction on even on low resolutions, and with this setting I found a good compromise.


The other settings that I normally use are:
30% phosphor blend (for all roms),
Interpolation
S-video TV mode.

 

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On 11/5/2020 at 3:49 PM, Schvenn said:

I need to press and hold the button for probably 0.25 to 0.5 seconds in order to get it to act like a proper fire button.

It's simply not sensitive enough to recognize proper rapid fire, like you would use in real world gaming.

Otherwise, the Stella doesn't seem to recognize it.

Is there a setting for sensitivity in the interface?

I haven't found one.

Try spraying some contact cleaner in the connector plugs' receptacles of the old joysticks. There's no electronics inside a cx-10. Just like the retron joystick it only contains 5 mechanical switches, so there's no way the software can differentiate between the two. The only explanation IMHO is oxidation/poor electrical contact. Maybe the controller ports on the R77 have very sligthly different dimensions compared to those on an original console, and produce intermittent contact.

Also check that the plugs aren't visibly worn out, as that might make them not work reliably depending on which particular socket they're plugged in.

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I do Stella on WindowsPC. I set the scanlines to 6 with interpolation way back at version 3.9.3 and haven't adjusted the setting since.

 

I recall when scanlines (on any emulator really) came out - everyone would seemingly use high settings, thus seriously overdoing it. Scanlines IMHO are best enjoyed as a texture. As a flavoring. Should never be set to where that's the first thing you notice, but, instead, something you pick up on much later during a quiet part of a game.

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17 hours ago, stephena said:

We will try to address this over the next few weeks, and have a fix for the next release.  Thanks for the extended testing.

Could this be a similar problem as with joystick "up" not working? Maybe there is a contact problem?

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  • 3 weeks later...
On 11/6/2020 at 4:17 PM, stephena said:

We will try to address this over the next few weeks, and have a fix for the next release.  Thanks for the extended testing.

Any progress on this? I'm trying to capture video for Avalanche, and can't get paddle buttons to work with my Stelladaptor (they work fine in 6.0.2, so it isn't hardware). Thanks!

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 11/2/2020 at 5:49 AM, stephena said:

@Nathan Strum, since you were one of the people most requesting the fullscreen video/pixel-exact snapshot stuff, could you please report back that this is now working for you?

Yes - it's working perfectly now! Sorry for the delay responding, it took awhile to get 60fps video capture working properly (not a Stella issue - an Apple one).

 

I managed to capture quite a few videos for the new AA games using 6.4, and being able to turn off the scaling was really helpful. I did all of the scaling just once - in Premiere. Everything looks very clean.

 

As an aside, Time Machine is really helpful for making those videos too. Now I can just backup and redo really embarrassing mistakes when playing the games, and no one is the wiser*. :D 

 

*Note: Unfortunately, I'm still pretty terrible at some of them, and no amount of replaying can fix that. Apologies to any programmers who cringe watching those videos. ;) 

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A few side notes regarding paddles, in Stella 6.4 on MacOS Catalina:

  • When using my Stelladaptor with paddles, and they were extremely jittery. The onscreen paddles in Avalanche would jitter just sitting still. I had to crank up Stella's dejitter settings to make them stop, but then they became too unresponsive to be usable. These same paddles are silky-smooth on real hardware.
  • When I switched to a 2600-daptor D9, the same paddles smoothed right out, and I could turn dejitter back down.
  • For both the Stelladaptor and 2600-daptor, if I unplug the USB cable from them while Stella is running, Stella instantly crashes.
  • The paddle button does work on the 2600-daptor. But not on the Stelladaptor.
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Having things working correctly with 2600-daptor and not the Stelladaptor is a consequence of almost all testing being done on the former, I guess.  We will try to test on the latter too.  But it would be better to rule out that you don't have a wonky Stelladaptor.  Can you test it on older versions of Stella, to try to locate the release where it stopped working?

 

As for crashing when unplugging, I have a pretty good idea what's causing that one.

 

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17 hours ago, Nathan Strum said:

A few side notes regarding paddles, in Stella 6.4 on MacOS Catalina:

  • When using my Stelladaptor with paddles, and they were extremely jittery. The onscreen paddles in Avalanche would jitter just sitting still. I had to crank up Stella's dejitter settings to make them stop, but then they became too unresponsive to be usable. These same paddles are silky-smooth on real hardware.
  • When I switched to a 2600-daptor D9, the same paddles smoothed right out, and I could turn dejitter back down.
  • For both the Stelladaptor and 2600-daptor, if I unplug the USB cable from them while Stella is running, Stella instantly crashes.
  • The paddle button does work on the 2600-daptor. But not on the Stelladaptor.

 

There is dejitter already programmed into the 2600-daptors (all versions).  There does not appear to be any in the Stelladaptor.

 

I find there is some jitter on the real hardware.  Varies with the game and where the player is positioned.  I tweaked my dejitter to try to have my adapters give a similar result.  Personally would rather not see any further dejittering done in the emulator, so would prefer the default Stella dejittering w/ 2600-daptor to be low or even none.

 

The Stelladaptor, however, definitely needs emulator dejittering.

 

Tom

http://2600-daptor.com/

 

 

Edited by dualcam
grammer
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3 minutes ago, dualcam said:

There is dejitter already programmed into the 2600-daptors (all versions).  There does not appear to be any in the Stelladaptor.

 

I find there is some jitter on the real hardware.  Varies with the game and where the player is positioned.  I tweaked my dejitter to try to have my adapters give a similar result.  Personally would rather not see any further dejittering done in the emulator, so would prefer the default Stella dejittering w/ 2600-daptor to be low or even none.

 

The Stelladaptor, however, definitely needs emulator dejittering.

That's good info, thanks! Can you elaborate a bit how your dejitter works?

 

Currently we only have a global, configurable dejitter setting in Stella. But we have:

  • different sets of paddles, some may jitter more than others
  • different types of adapters, some dejitter and one doesn't

I suppose individual settings for all these combinations would result into too many parameters and an overly complicated the configuration. 

 

But we will add a note to the docs that the 2600-daptors already have a built-in dejitter.

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  • 2 weeks later...

When i have an bin-file with the three letters "pal" in the filename, Stella starts the file in PAL Mode.

This is very  confusing.

 

Sure, i can press Control+F, but Is there a way to disable this "feature" by default? Maybe there is already a button for this?

 

Same situation with ntsc or secam in filenames, but i know no words with this beginning.

 

In any case, thank you for your permanently good project work :thumbsup:

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No there is no option to disable this logic. Like all automatic logics, they sometimes fail as in your case. But as long as they get the vast majority right, they are very useful.

 

If you want to avoid this happening for a file, go into Option/Game Properties/Emulation and select the correct TV format. Stella will then skip the logic for this file.

 

BTW: What is your file name? The logic looks for an isolated string, so e.g. "xpal.bin" or "palx.bin" would not be detected as PAL, "x-pal.bin", "x_pal.bin" or "x(pal).bin" would.

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@Stephena: I started working on a new 2600 game recently.  I'm not too far along in development, but I am having an issue in Stella 6.4 with the disassembly view that is making debugging difficult.  The disassembly seems to stop fairly early in the code, then just shows the raw bytes (see below).  If I re-arrange my code, I can see different parts disassembled to about the same point.  I don't think my code is all that unusual.  I started with an early step of a Darrell Spice tutorial and have been replacing parts of it to have a more fancy score and status area.  Do you have any ideas what could cause this and what I should do to get a full disassembly so I step through my code more effectively?  I tried the right-click "Disassemble @ current line" command, but it does not do anything.  I don't see any errors on the main console or the System Log.  The last statement to disassemble in my current build is at address $F08D:

 

image.thumb.png.963747643719136c9caf46f3f4f6bec0.png

 

Thanks for any suggestions!  

--

Mike

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The disassembly shouldn't stop in the middle of detected code, that's a bug.

 

Did you use 'Dissassemble @ current line' at the first raw byte? Or e.g. at 'Kernel'?

 

Also: Can you post the DiStella config file created in that situation by 'saveconfig', please?

Edited by Thomas Jentzsch
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