3.4.1 to 3.5: (December 29, 2011)



* Stella is now DonationWare! Please see the DonationWare link on the

main webpage for more information.



* Added several improvements to the joystick management code. Joystick

event mapping is now saved per device, meaning that if you map events

to a certain joystick device, remove the device and then later insert

it again, Stella will remember the original mapping.



* The total number of joysticks present and their associated properties

(number of axes, buttons and hats) is now dynamic. That is, there´s

no longer a hard-coded limit on the number of joysticks that Stella

can use, or the number of buttons, etc that it contains. This fixes

a serious bug with PS3 controllers with 27 buttons, whereby adding a

mapping for joystick 0 would inadvertantly change settings for

joystick 1, and could potentially lead to a program crash.



* Added ´mcontrol´ commandline argument, which can specify to use each

mouse axis as a separate paddle. The old (and default) behaviour can

be activated by setting this argument to ´auto´. Related to this,

removed redundant ´usemouse´ argument.



* Huge restructuring of the OpenGL code, making it compatible with

OpenGL 2.x+ features (such as vertex buffer objects), while at the

same time keeping compatibility with OpenGL 1.5 / OpenGL ES.

Because of the required changes, TV effects were removed (they will

be added again for the next release).



* Improvements to audio handling, particularly for certain cases of

Windows, ATI video cards, and OpenGL mode. The sound device is now

opened only once when Stella starts, and is paused between loading

different ROMs. This fixes a problem whereby sound could possibly

not be functional after loading the first ROM. Related to this,

removed the ´audiofirst´ commandline argument as it´s now redundant.



* Fixed bug with displaying the ROM launcher in Windows XP; the initial

load was sometimes taking up to 30 seconds to complete.



* Added logging facility, whereby the output of the application is

available within Stella itself. This can still be printed to the

console, or also saved to a file. Add the ´loglevel´ and

´logtoconsole´ commandline arguments which control these settings,

and removed the ´showinfo´ argument as it´s now redundant.



* Updated DPC+ bankswitching scheme to latest code provided by

SpiceWare.



* Added MAMCR handling to the Thumb ARM emulation code. Note that

MAMCR isn´t actually emulated, it is just ignored for now. This

fixes a bug whereby accessing MAMCR would crash the ARM emulation.



* Added ´thumb.trapfatal´ commandline argument, which causes the

Thumb ARM emulation to either trap on a fatal error (throw an

exception to the debugger and exit emulation) or simply log the

error and continue. This should normally always be enabled, but

can be disabled by developers for testing reasons.



* Updated default snapshot directory to be much saner and easier to

find. For most systems, it now defaults to the users ´Desktop´.

Note that the commandline argument has changed to ´snapdir´.



* The debugger ´print´ command now indicates "special" addresses if

they are read-only (R), write-only (W) or read-write (R/W).



* Fixed a bug where scrolling the mouse-wheel in certain debugger UI

items would cause the program to crash; scrolling now works as

expected.



* Fixed minor display issue in the debugger RAM area; some addresses

were being displayed as ´...´.



* Fixed compile issues in the latest versions of Ubuntu and Debian, and

fixed UNIX desktop file so that Stella will launch with a ROM when

selected from its icon. Thanks go to Stephen Kitt for this code.



* Updated included PNG library to latest stable version.



* Updated the credits list in the documentation, listing people that

have donated hardware to the Stella team.



-Have fun!