[Console] Atari 2600 (Stella)

[Tom Speirs]

Emulator support topic for: [Console] Atari 2600 (Stella)

Atari 2600 emulator

Stella

[wirthy]

When I launch an Atari 2600 game with the Stella emulator, the game appears to launch fine but no keyboard or joystick inputs work.  The problem seems to be that, while the game is displayed on the screen, Stella is not the "active" window.  If I ALT-TAB over to Stella, then everything works fine.    I'm guessing I need to change an Emulator Setting in "Launch List" or "Window Options", but I cant seem to get it to work.

Any help would be appreciated. 

[Draco1962]

What version of GameEx are you using?

[wirthy]

I am using GameEx Evolution 1.06 beta

[tthurman]

Please launch EVO and replicate the problem, immediately exit and  go back into setup wizard and head to the debug section, hit the "zip logs to desktop" and "zip last run output to desktop" and provide the results here to give some insight as to what may be occurring.

 

Thanks!

 

[wirthy]

[GAMEEXEVO_LAST_RUN_OUTPUT].7z[GAMEEXEVO_LOGS].7z

Attached are the zipped files requested.  And here is a video, illustrating the issue I'm having:  

 

[tthurman]

Can you run Process Hacker and see if some process has launched and staying open?  I recall during testing that this occurred and the problem was that Evo had to be told to ignore this process.  Seems like something stealing focus is perhaps the real problem here.

Thanks!

 

[wirthy]

I ran Process Hacker and noticed that, when I try to play a game on Stella, an pre-installed app called Xbox Game Bar launched.  This can actually be seen in the youtube video I posted earlier.   I uninstalled all Xbox software, hoping that would solve the problem.  But it did not.  

I did find out that if I try to play an Atari 2600 game, do the required ALT-TAB to bring up Stella, exit the game and exit Stella, and try the process again, it works fine --- I do NOT have to do the ALT-TAB thing.  Then it continues to work fine as long as I don't restart GameEx Evolution.

Any thoughts on that?

[tthurman]

My guess would be that since the process has already interrupted EVO, that on subsequent launches it doesn't interfere and since it doesn't steal focus from Stella, there's no problem.

I'm not 100% certain that my hunch on this is correct ,but back when we did early stage testing on Evo there were similar instances when processes launched and exited for Steam support.  It appears this could be the same and just needs to be added to the ignore list so it launches normally without interruption.

 

Note that I'm not a dev, so one of them will need to confirm whether or not this is the case.

[tthurman]

Did you try turning off the XBOX Game Bar?

https://www.tenforums.com/tutorials/8637-turn-off-xbox-game-bar-windows-10-a.html

Could be a remnant of the program is still trying to execute a launch.

 

[wirthy]

Yes, I completed removed / uninstalled XBOX Game Bar

[tthurman]

Since removing it is process hacker showing anything going on when launching stella?