Date:  Sat, 17 Jun 2006 21:40:26 -0400
From:  madodel <madodel at ptdprolog.net>
Subject:  [VOICENWS] SW: Stella/2 updated to v2.2

++ From the VOICE OS/2-eCS News Service   http://www.os2voice.org ++

From: Paul Smedley <paulDESPAM at DESPAMsmedley.info>

Now available from http://smedley.info/os2ports/

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 PC 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 AcornOS, AmigaOS, DOS, FreeBSD, IRIX, Linux, OS/2, MacOS, Unix, and 
Windows. The development team is working hard to perfect the emulator and 
we hope you enjoy our effort.

New in v2.2:
Stella release 2.2 for Linux, Mac OSX, Windows, WinCE and GP2X is now 
available. Ports to other operating systems will be released as they become 
available. A partial list of features is:

     * Added new ROM browser option which works like a normal filesystem 
browser, allowing navigation throughout the filesystem. The old mode of 
browsing is still present, and can be toggled at runtime. Related to this, 
fixed bug whereby sorting in the ROM launcher sometimes didn't work.
     * Integrated stella.pro properties into the application, resulting in 
faster startup time. Now Stella can be redistributed as a single binary; no 
external files are needed, but they will still be used if present.
     * Reworked ROM properties files once again. The 'user.pro' file has 
been removed, and all user-defined properties are stored in 'stella.pro' 
instead. You should delete all properties files when upgrading to this 
version, to take advantage of the speed increases.
     * Reworked settings files once again. Removed all references to a 
global settings file. Each user now gets a user-specific settings file 
only. If that file doesn't exist, the built-in defaults are used.
     * Added 'conditional saving' of the cheatcode and settings files, so 
that these files are only written to disk when absolutely necessary. This 
doesn't really affect desktop systems, but is very useful for systems with 
flashram-based storage (GP2X, WinCE, etc).
     * Reworked Settings class, hopefully fixing a bug whereby settings 
weren't being saved in certain cases (most evident in the OSX port).
     * Added 'tiadefaults' commandline option, which can also be toggled 
from within the GUI. This option disables all TIA positioning 'tweaks' that 
typically make a game look better, and present the image exactly as it 
would appear on a real 2600.
     * Added jitter-detection code for the paddle emulation, which should 
eliminate an annoying 'jittering' effect when using paddles with a 
Stelladaptor.
     * Related to jitter-detection, added '-pthresh' commandline option and 
GUI entry, which sets a bound below which the emulation detects jitter.
     * Fixed crash when adding one-shot cheats.
     * Fixed bug in RAM comparitive searches in the debugger.
     * Fixed bug with setting snapshot naming type from the GUI (it was 
always being set to 'romname').
     * Re-added low compatibility CPU emulation mode, since it benefits 
some slower systems. This is activated with the commandline argument '-cpu 
low'.



-- 

  Warpstock 2006 - Windsor, Ontario, Canada, October 12-15th,
http://www.warpstock.org
  Warpstock Europe - http://www.warpstock.net

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