Re: [stella] [Stella] Help on emulators needed

Subject: Re: [stella] [Stella] Help on emulators needed
From: bwmott@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Wed, 8 Apr 1998 13:19:48 -0400 (EDT)
> This seems to be a bug in Stella. If a program contains long
> parts with all the same byte, Stella assumes the program uses
> a superchip. To fix this you could edit the STELLA.VCS file
> and make an entry for every program to tell Stella, that 
> this program is in 2kb or 4kb format.

Actually, I believe it's a ROM checksum conflict.  If I remember
correctly the ROM checksum is based on the second 1K of memory 
in the cartridge.  Thus for small programs there's a good change 
it'll conflict with another checksum and the properties for that 
game will be used :-(  Usually this means the wrong bank-switching
method will be used and Stella crashes....

Luckily, this problem will be fixed in the next release of Stella.
The next release uses a 128-bit checksum calculated on the entire 
ROM image.  So far I haven't seen any conflicts with this approach.

> But I think using PCAE 2.0b would be a better choice, since
> it also has a nice debugger. I don't remember the address of
> the homepage, but I think Nick has a link to it on his Atari
> programming pages at http://www.primenet.com/~nickb/atariprg.htm

Currently, I'm working on a new and improved GUI for the X Windows 
version of Stella and plan on including a debugger for it.  Hopefully,
the debugger will make it into the other ports as well.

Brad

P.S.    If there's any feature you'd like to see in the next release
        of Stella let me know and I'll see what I can do

P.P.S.  I've handled the DOS port of Stella for the last few releases,
        however, due to my lack of time I'd like to find someone else 
        to take care of it.  If you're intested and have some DOS
        programming experience let me know.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bradford W. Mott (bwmott@xxxxxxx)          Computer Science Department
http://www4.ncsu.edu/~bwmott/www           North Carolina State University
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