14 DAY TRIAL // The development team behind the Stella open-source, free and cross-platform Atari 2600 VCS emulator software has announced the release of Stella 4.7, a major version that adds several new features and many under-the-hood improvements.
According to the release notes, attached at the end of the article for reference, Stella 4.7 improves the paddle emulation by adding the ability for owners of a digital device or a mouse to specify the paddles' maximum range of movement for the emulation. There is also support for a range of integers from 1 to 20 to designate the scale movement during emulation of paddles, not to mention smoother movement.
"This is useful since on a real console most paddle games use very little of the paddle range, and could result in moving the mouse onscreen with nothing appearing to happen (when in effect it was as if you turned a real paddle all the way to the end of the range). This eliminates issues in (for example) Kaboom, where there was a huge 'deadzone' when moving to the left," reads the announcement.
Stella now has a 0.00 defect rate
In addition to the paddle emulation improvements mentioned above, Stella 4.7 adds a 'CV+' bankswitching scheme, which contains the same RAM that is available for the CV scheme and switchable 2K ROM segments through $3D. It also updates the entire code with numerous C++11 enhancements, and it now has a 0.00 defect rate, as reported by the Coverity software testing and static analysis tools.
Several bugs have been fixed as well in this release. Among the most important ones, we ca mention an issue in TIA emulation's Score mode where TIA object colors' associated priority was incorrect, and a problem in the ROM launcher that caused the software to always show the last opened ROM instead of the current one. An issue with the storing of ROM's properties on external files has also been removed.
Download Stella 4.7 for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows operating systems right now from Softpedia.