One thing that's made the programming easier is Stella now includes a built in debugger that allows you to single step the CPU. That's made finding problems much easier. I've only had a few problems using Stella: the paddles don't read correctly while debugging and I found a couple things where Stella wasn't accurately emulating the 2600. The game looked OK in the emulator, but not OK on a real Atari. Luckily I'd only made a couple changes when those cropped up so it was easy to figure out what was going wrong - basically certain registers should not be updated within x number of CPU cycles after certain other register have been updated.

I'm trying to get some more stuff done for the show, but had a major setback when my iMac stopped working last week. Apple's [link|http://www.apple.com/support/imac/repairextensionprogram/|extended the warranty] for this problem so the repair is covered. The computer worked for a couple days after the blue smoke escaped so I was able to get current backups of the important data. I dropped it off at CompUSA Thursday night and called for a status update Sunday and was told they confirmed it was that problem and the replacement power supply will be in this week; however, their Mac Tech only works weekends. So I've spent Sunday night and yesterday evening recreating my 2600 development environment on my Thinkpad under Linux - I'm only missing Linux software to use of my [link|http://www.arminvogl.de/KrokodileCartridge/|Krokodile Cartridge] which allows testing the code on a real Atari.

Yes, they do have unusual names up there. Of course, Nacadocious isn't far from Houston :-) I'd like to go but I'm already commited to being in Nekoosa, WI in for July 4th and I can't afford to make the trip to Wisconsin twice.