The developers of the Stella open-source, cross-platform, and free Atari 2600 VCS emulator software for GNU/Linux, Microsoft Windows, and Mac OS X operating systems, have announced the release of Stella 4.6.5.
According to the release notes (attached below for reference), Stella 4.6.5 comes with great new features, among which we can mention mappable events that can be assigned to a single key or joystick button, used for toggling TV color and black & white, as well as right and left difficulty A/B events, the inclusion of the latest stable PNG library (libpng), and compatibility with the Xcode 7 IDE for the Mac OS X port.
Furthermore, Stella 4.6.5 now lets users edit values in debugger’s widgets, supporting only several binary and decimal fields at the moment – upcoming Stella releases will add support for editing even more widgets, an application icon has been added to the Microsoft Windows port of Stella, which will now be displayed in the Control Panel’s Add/Remove Programs list, and the ‘hidecursor’ command-line argument is now known as ‘cursor’ and lets users set mouse cursor visibility separately for emulation and UI modes.
The DPC+ scheme and TIA component of Stella have been updated to emulate the jitter resulted from using Fractional Datafetchers when DFxFRACINC registers cannot be reinitialized every frame and non-consistent frame-over-frame scanline counts, respectively, and the autodetection function of the MDM scheme has been updated to detect the bank 0 or bank 1 position of the identification string.
Several issues have been resolved in this release
In addition to the great new features mentioned above, Stella 4.6.5 fixes several bugs reported by users since the previous release of the software. For example, a bug in the snapshot tool that made the outputted snapshots of a TIA image to include parts of the UI (User Interface) screen, most noticeable on Mac OS X platforms, has been fixed in this maintenance release.
Also, a memory leak has been plugged from Stella, making the game console close correctly after ejecting a ROM. Download Stella 4.6.5 for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X, and Microsoft Windows operating systems right now from Softpedia, where you can find both binary and sources package for 32-bit and 64-bit hardware architectures. More details about Stella can be found on its website.
Via Softpedia