Stella For Gp2x


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halo9

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Hi

Sorry, I'm a bit of a lurker on this forum and haven't posted before, but I got my little GP2x in one of the early batches from Craig at GBAX in November after borrowing a GP32 from a friend and have been following all the emus, updates and a lot of the banter around here... Can't wait to get my hands on the peripherals when they start to get around.

Just thought I'd ask for a bit of help with the Stella emu I downloaded last night as I've read the readme and searched the forums without much luck.

Fist up, what is the format for the ROM's? I'm not asking where to find them, although I thought Atari had released some of these ROMs. I have some with the extension *.a26 and some with *.bin. When I use the *.a26 ROMs, they are not listed my the file browser. I can't get the emu to run at all with the *.bin files. They seem to freeze up the unit (bad ROMs?). Hopefully I can say that much here.

Is there a preffered SD card path for the files? the readme says not, but I thought I'd ask. I've tried a variety of locations.

When I do get it working, is there an upper limit to the number of roms the browser will see. 2600 ROMs are only tiny!

I'm really looking forward to getting this working, I fried my real 2600 recently and theres a stack of carts looking me in the face... Go easy on me, I'm just a noob. Not much good with scripts and those clever things either.

Thanks in advance.
 
The readme tells you to put the roms in Stella/Roms/ if Stella is the folder you have the emu in.

It works with .bin files, I renamed a couple of my .a26 files and they worked fine.

No idea on the limit, try a couple of games first then add to that.
 
Thanks for that, Iorgy

Some more info: my roms already are in a folder called 'roms' in the stella directory (named 'stella'). After I select the rom in Kounch's green browser, I get a black screen for about 10 seconds. It then goes to the second, black and green file browser and the roms are all listed as 'untitled' and are not selectable as the unit freezes up here. I've tried a number of roms and also with only two or three in the directory.
As in the readme, the emu does create the selcfg and stella.cache files and the state directory but not the stellarc file.

Sorry if this is a hassle.

Cheers
 
It works better for you than for me.... Mine just freezes at the black screen and never even attempts to start the games. Of course, maybe the fact that I have the entire known romset is confusing it.

BTW, I thought Atari had released these roms as well, I know at least one Atari fansite that is not usually considered a romsite that has these...
 
jmetal88 posted on Jan 2 2006 said:
It works better for you than for me.... Mine just freezes at the black screen and never even attempts to start the games. Of course, maybe the fact that I have the entire known romset is confusing it.

BTW, I thought Atari had released these roms as well, I know at least one Atari fansite that is not usually considered a romsite that has these...
​
Click to expand...

halo9: After I select the rom in Kounch's green browser, I get a black screen for about 10 seconds. It then goes to the second, black and green file browser and the roms are all listed as 'untitled' and are not selectable as the unit freezes up here.
Click to expand...


halo9: it sounds like you have the release that had the initial compression fault. The file 'stella' should be over 7mb, if you have the one that's around 2mb, try reinstalling.

jmetall88: make sure you have enough free space on your SD card... I would say at least 7mb. Stella caches to the SD card and needs space to operate.

Anyone that downloaded the package immediately after the release, might have problems with the second GUI showing up. If your exec is 2mb, download and reinstall with the 7mb exec.

If you have the latest version and are getting just a blank screen, I have had the same thing happen on certain ROMs. This could be a product of the Stella core, a side-effect of the port, or both. Maybe even a bad rom... but I can't be certain yet.

The rom loader does not recognize zip archives, although the stella exec can run them. Because the loader is blind to zips, the ability is not there at the moment. Although... by adding the line:

Code: 
fileFilter=zip
to the 'selcfg' file, it may be possible to pass individually zipped roms. I will test this before I recommend it to anyone.

To fix the a26 extension issue add this to 'selcfg' :
Code: 
fileFilter=a26

As for the black screen between the loader and the emu... if it goes on for more than 30 seconds, I would say that the GP2X froze. But even during a successful load, there is still the black screen. My heart skips a beat everytime I see it, but that's the nature of the beast for now. Also, I've noticed that execution hangs in the presence of large quantities of roms. I am working to fix these issues.

Again this is a beta release, so it is going to be buggy. I will be watching this thread and the dev thread so if you have any questions, comments, or complaints, feel free to voice them.

Alex
 
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Thanks zansatsu, I must have been too quick to download there. I had the 2Mb file. It works perfectly now. I certainly wasn't meaning to complain about the status of the emu. Keep up the good work! As you noted, it seems happier with lower numbers of roms in the directory (<256?). Also, not a complaint just a note, but 'start' does not always seem to exit the emulator for me.

Regarding legal ROMs, according to the the fansite FAQ I was looking at, "In the case of Atari games, nobody seems to care because they are so old."
I'm sure someone on here knows the full story though.

Now back to california games..!

Thanks again
 
halo9 posted on Jan 2 2006 said:
Thanks zansatsu, I must have been too quick to download there. I had the 2Mb file. It works perfectly now. I certainly wasn't meaning to complain about the status of the emu. Keep up the good work! As you noted, it seems happier with lower numbers of roms in the directory (<256?). Also, not a complaint just a note, but 'start' does not always seem to exit the emulator for me.
​
Click to expand...


Yeah... I've noticed that. I wanted to make sure it wasn't just me. Start exits the first time, then hangs the second. That's our first bug:

Bug #1: The "2nd start" exit bug.


BTW: Complaints do not offend me. If no one ever complained, nothing would ever get fixed. Keep the comments coming.

Alex
 
Last edited by a moderator:
zansatsu posted on Jan 2 2006 said:
halo9 posted on Jan 2 2006 said:
Thanks zansatsu, I must have been too quick to download there. I had the 2Mb file. It works perfectly now. I certainly wasn't meaning to complain about the status of the emu. Keep up the good work! As you noted, it seems happier with lower numbers of roms in the directory (<256?). Also, not a complaint just a note, but 'start' does not always seem to exit the emulator for me.
​
Click to expand...


Yeah... I've noticed that. I wanted to make sure it wasn't just me. Start exits the first time, then hangs the second. That's our first bug:

Bug #1: The "2nd start" exit bug.


BTW: Complaints do not offend me. If no one ever complained, nothing would ever get fixed. Keep the comments coming.

Alex
​
Click to expand...
I found it worked fine for me
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Just found this Windows app that will batch rename file extensions: http://www.leeos.com/rename_extensions.html

I've used it to rename all my *.a26 files to *.bin with no problem, you need to follow the readme to edit the file 'c:\windows\Rename.ini' and add 'bin' to the list of extensions in the 'change to' box.

The few ROMs I've tested after doing this seem to work.
 
Hmmm... I'm only getting a black screen on execution... I think the GP2X is just freezing.

I have the 7mb.gpe version. I'm installed in /stella with a handful of roms in /stella/roms. All 4 files are copied to /stella. After running it and reseting the GP2X, I noticed that none of the files or directories, as mentioned in the readme, were created. Any ideas or just a bug?

Thanks for the emulator though, it sounds as if this will easily surpass the GP32 atari emulator.
 
reaper79 posted on Jan 2 2006 said:
Hmmm... I'm only getting a black screen on execution... I think the GP2X is just freezing.

I have the 7mb.gpe version. I'm installed in /stella with a handful of roms in /stella/roms. All 4 files are copied to /stella. After running it and reseting the GP2X, I noticed that none of the files or directories, as mentioned in the readme, were created. Any ideas or just a bug?

Thanks for the emulator though, it sounds as if this will easily surpass the GP32 atari emulator.
​
Click to expand...

How much free space do you have on your SD card?

Alex
 
Last edited by a moderator:
zansatsu posted on Jan 2 2006 said:
reaper79 posted on Jan 2 2006 said:
Oh, probably about 600mb or so.  I unpacked the tar with winzip, should that matter?  Trying 7zip right now.
​
Click to expand...

I recommend Ark or the command-line tar and gzip... but I'm on linux.
Weird.
​
Click to expand...

Ah ha! I used 7zip and unpacked it, and it works now. Evidently winzip isn't all that great at unpacking tar.gz files. It unpacked it fine, but maybe it messed up the binary or something... I don't know. Working fine now.

Note to all those on windows, don't use winzip to upanck :rolleyes:

Thanks again Zansatsu!
 
Last edited by a moderator:
reaper79 posted on Jan 2 2006 said:
zansatsu posted on Jan 2 2006 said:
reaper79 posted on Jan 2 2006 said:
Oh, probably about 600mb or so.  I unpacked the tar with winzip, should that matter?  Trying 7zip right now.
​
Click to expand...

I recommend Ark or the command-line tar and gzip... but I'm on linux.
Weird.
​
Click to expand...

Ah ha! I used 7zip and unpacked it, and it works now. Evidently winzip isn't all that great at unpacking tar.gz files. It unpacked it fine, but maybe it messed up the binary or something... I don't know. Working fine now.

Note to all those on windows, don't use winzip to upanck :rolleyes:

Thanks again Zansatsu!
​
Click to expand...
I prefer 7zip over winrar and winzip but Im on linux now so yeah
 
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