Stella 2.6
The Atari 2600 Video Computer System (VCS), introduced in 1977, was the most popular home video game system of the early 1980′s. Now you can enjoy all of your favorite Atari 2600 games on your Mac thanks to Stella!
Stella is a multi-platform Atari 2600 VCS emulator released under the GNU General Public License (GPL). Stella was originally developed for Linux by Bradford W. Mott, however, since its original release several people have joined the development team to port Stella to other operating systems such as Mac OS X, AcornOS, AmigaOS, DOS, FreeBSD, IRIX, Linux, OS/2, and Unix. The development team is working hard to perfect the emulator and we hope you enjoy our effort.
What’s new:
Version 2.6:
• Added AtariVox support using a real AtariVox device, where Stella sends data directly to the AtariVox. For now, this is supported in Linux/UNIX, OSX, and Win32 only. You’ll obviously need a real AtariVox, and a serial<->USB adaptor to connect it to your system. Added ‘-avoxport’ commandline argument used to set the serial port to which the AtariVox is connected. Special thanks to Al Yarusso and Richard H. for providing sample hardware.
• Added AtariVox and SaveKey EEPROM emulation. This reads/writes data to a 32KB file, not to the actual hardware. Very useful for testing EEPROM support without actually wearing out the real device. Special thanks to J. Payson for providing the EEPROM emulation code, and A. Herbert for answering many driver-related questions.
• Added support for CX-22, CX-80, and AmigaMouse trackball controllers.
• Improved debugger symfile handling so that addresses accessed as read-only won’t use write-only labels (and vice-versa). More work is still needed in this area.
• Added M6532/RIOT tab to the debugger. This will be expanded on in a future release.
• Added TIA emulation fixes for graphical glitches in Escape from the Mindmaster, Mission Survive, Solaris, and SWOOPS!
• Fixed bug where fullscreen OpenGL scaling wasn’t working on 4:3 monitors.
• Further improvements to the M6532/RIOT emulation, which unfortunately have broken old state files (again).
• Added deadzone setting, for adjusting the deadzone amount for analog joysticks. This can be set using the commandline argument ‘-joydeadzone’ or dynamically within the UI.
• Make ROM disassembly in debugger take advantage of a wide window.
• Fixed bug in 6507 BCD handling introduced in the last release.
• For the Win32 port; Win9x should be fully supported again.
