Stella 3.0 Released

Stella 3.0 Released

September 12th, 2009, 18:31 Posted By: bazziebizzle

via Bazzie Bizzle.com

After years of hard work and weeks of alpha and beta testing, our good friend Stephen Anthony has released Stella 3.0. Ports for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows have been released. Other ports will be released as they become available. Support has been discontinued for Windows 95/98/ME starting with 3.0.

Here's what's new in the long awaited Stella 3.0:

Huge updates to the TIA emulation system. Illegal HMOVEs are now handled correctly, resulting in improvements to many ROMs (thanks to Wilbert Pol for many ideas and code for these improvements). All HMOVE emulation 'cheats' were removed; the emulation is now cycle-exact in this area.
Improved emulation of the Cosmic Ark 'starfield effect', also used in Stay Frosty; the emulation now looks very accurate.
Many improvements to the normal TIA rendering code, fixing problems when disabling certain graphical objects (certain objects were being misdrawn when others were enabled/disabled).
Improved TIA collision handling in the non-displayable area of the screen; this fixes problems in RAMRacer ROM.
Improved TIA redraw problems/graphical garbage when ROMs generate many more scanlines than a real TV would allow; this fixes problems in Q-Bert and the recent Playaround demo.
Added 'Fixed Debug Colors' option similar to the no$26k emulator. This allows each graphical object to be drawn in a fixed color, more clearly showing how the objects interact. HMOVE blanks are also shown in a different color. The TIA now emulates a 7-color register model, allowing even shared objects to show different colors. This is toggled with the 'Alt Comma' key.
Related to 'Fixed Debug Colors', HMOVE blanks can now toggled during TIA display with the 'Alt-m' key.
Added rewind functionality to the debugger, where states are saved after each step/trace/scanline/frame advance. Pressing 'Alt-r' or clicking the new rewind button will undo up to 100 previous operations.
Added 'electron beam indicator' to the debugger TIA output. Basically, this is a visual pointer indicating the position of the electron gun when scanning the display.
Added ability to completely disable fullscreen mode, which fixes problems for some people where fullscreen mode was being entered even if it wasn't enabled.
Added '-joyallow4' commandline argument and associated UI item to allow all 4 directions to be pressed simultaneously on a joystick.
Improvements made to the ROM launcher: the backspace key now goes to the parent directory (this key can be remapped), and previously selected directories are now automatically selected.
Added support for 2IN1 bankswitching scheme, where two ROMs are present in one binary. Currently supported are 2, 4, 8, and 16K ROMs.
Added bankswitch support for the 6K version of Starpath/Supercharger ROMS. This allows the 6K version of Cubis to run.
Updated bankswitching schemes FASC and MB; they are now known as FA and F0, respectively. This naming brings Stella in line with other emulators and programming utilities.
Fixed editing of cheats in the Cheat Dialog; the old cheat wasn't being removed.

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