[stella] Weird timing bug, I think...help!

Subject: [stella] Weird timing bug, I think...help!
From: Adam Thornton <adam@xxxxxxx>
Date: Sat, 20 Apr 2002 12:11:54 -0500
Well, I finally got home, and Randy Crihfield's package had arrived with
_Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring_ in it.

And I ran to plug it in...and....

The text is unreadable.  It's doing this weird sort of
horizontal-wrapping thing, and some text is appearing in the overscan
area, and in general it looks like I'm just taking too many cycles per
scan line.  And the colors are weird and fadey.

I'm perfectly willing to believe that I'm taking too long per scan or
that I've somehow damaged the timing, but there's something I don't
understand. 

I could understand if I were taking too long per scan and stella were
compensating; it could be assuming that it's a PAL game, or just
silently accepting the fact that the scan line is too long and dealing
with it.  But the really strange thing is: the game works fine on my
Supercharger.  And I certainly don't understand why the SC would have
any different timing than ROM.

One thing that might prove a further clue: on xstella, the game appears
as yellow-on-purple.  On the SC, it appears as yellow-on-red.  On the
ROM cart, it appears as yellow-on-purple, modulo the color fading stuff.
So maybe I'm somehow clobbering the color burst and the Supercharger is
somehow compensating for it?  (How would it do that?)  Dunno.  Anyway,
the question is, has anyone ever seen this behavior before?  I'm pretty
bummed, because if it had done this on the Supercharger, I could have
fixed it before telling Randy he was free to duplicate it for people.
And I really have *no clue at all* why it would work on the SC but not
on the actual ROM, and I'm hoping that someone here does know what's
going on.  Without an actual ROM burner I don't see any way to debug it,
either, because it doesn't misbehave either under stella or when played
into the Supercharger.

Help!

Adam
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