Stella is a program that will emulate the Atari 2600 VCS console. By using this emulator you will be able to load ROMs made for that system, especially games. Those ROMs are widely available on the Internet. Stella has been developed to work under many operating systems, like Linux, AcornOS, AmigaOS, DOS, FreeBSD, IRIX, OS/2, MacOS, Unix, and Windows.
The program’s interface can be controlled by either the mouse or the keyboard. You can configure it to show you video effects, which will mimic the image that you would obtain from a TV set (this console needed to be connected to a TV set to work, not to a PC monitor). Stella will also allow you to configure the audio settings, key controls, and joysticks. You can view the properties of the game "cartridge" that is currently loaded, and change the controls for each player. These settings can be saved to the ROMs for future usage. If you want to leave a program, all that you have to do is to press the ESC key. The ROM will be unloaded from memory and you will see Stella’s interface again.
I wrote this review with Stella installed under Windows 7, and it worked flawlessly.
v3.4 [Jun 1, 2011]
- Re-enabled 'grabmouse' commandline argument and associated functionality with the following changes:
1. it is changed in the "Input Settings' UI, not in 'Video Settings'
2. it only has meaning while in emulation mode
3. it is enabled by default
- Fixed bug with emulation of paddles using the mouse most evident in Warlords; movement was being filtered out if the mouse was moved too fast. There's still more work required in this area, however.
- Fixed bug with analog axes on gamepad devices, whereby jittering in these axes would override input from digital axis, hat or keyboard input.
- Fixed bug when switching to the debugger and back again would sometimes cause an extra mouse motion event (which would cause the emulation to think the mouse was moved and move the player accordingly).
- Tweaked bankswitch autodetection code for 4A50 bankswitching; several more test ROMs are automatically detected.
- The 'saverom' debugger command now saves ROMs in your home directory by default if you don't specify a valid path. This fixes a bug whereby ROMs were saved in strange locations and couldn't later be found.
- Fixed bug in automatically executing the debugger 'autoexec.stella' file; any commands it contained weren't actually being executed.
- Zero-byte ROMs are no longer loaded and mis-detected as Supercharger images.
Great platform for gamers who want to have access to all their favorite Electronic Arts games in one place
