The development team behind the Stella open-source, free and cross-platform Atari 2600 VCS emulator software have 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, support for range of integers from 1 to 20 to designate the scale movement during emulation of paddles, and 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, updates the entire code with numerous C++11 enhancements, as well as 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, and among the most important ones, we ca mention an issue in TIA emulation's Score mode where TIA object colours' associated priority was incorrect, a problem in the ROM launcher that caused the software to always show the last opened ROM instead of the current one, and an issue with the storing of ROM's properties on external files.

Download Stella 4.7 for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows operating systems right now from Softpedia.