Stella developers announced this past weekend the immediate availability for download of the first point release in the Stella 4.7 series of the free, open-source and cross-platform Atari 2600 VCS emulator.

According to the release notes (attached at the end of the article for reference), Stella 4.7.1 is a relatively small maintenance build that mainly fixes some of the issues reported by users since the previous version, Stella 4.7, such as a paddle range bug with the ROMs for the Medieval Mayhem game developed for the Atari 2600 video game console.

Additionally, the development team patched some issues with the Stelladaptor/2600-daptor controllers and paddles, which Linux users reported having large deadzones. They will now have to rely on an external app for setting the deadzone, which is called "evdev-joystick" and will be available for download from the project's website very soon.

The TV "jitter" emulation was improved as well in Stella 4.7.1, and the developers explained that "The recovery time can now be spread over multiple frames, to simulate a real TV taking multiple frames to recover. Related to this, added new command-line argument 'tv.jitter_recovery' to set the recovery time. Finally, enabling the jitter effect and the recovery time are now accessible through the UI."

Also new in Stella 4.7.1 is a fix for an issue that occurred when attempting to use more than two input controllers that have the same name, as all the controllers added after the second one borrowed its name, thus causing the disappearance of the joystick mappings. The Stella devs discovered this bug because the application saved information only for two controllers.

Last but not least, the internal ROM properties database was updated to ROM-Hunter version 11, along with the snapshot collection. Stella 4.7.1 is now available for download via our website for all supported operating systems, including GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows. More details can be found in the changelog attached below.