[The New Media Reader CD, eds. Noah Wardrip-Fruin & Nick Montfort, 2003]


Instructions for 

  ATARI

(Running Atari 2600 games in Stella, an Atari 2600 emulator)


On Windows, double-click on "Cyberstella.exe" to run the emulator. Then
select the game to play ("Adventure.bin", "Missile_Command.bin", or
"Yars_Revenge.bin") from the menu. (It does not matter that the file
stella.pro is missing.) On the Macintosh, you can simply drag 
"Adventure.bin", "Missile_Command.bin", or "Yars_Revenge.bin" onto the 
program "Stella." (You can also double-click on "Stella" and the select 
the game from the Open dialog.) Stella is available for many other 
platforms and can be downloaded from <http://stella.atari.org/>.

To begin playing any of these games, you will have to SELECT the game
variation and then press RESET to start the game, just as with an 
actual Atari 2600. The keyboard of your computer is mapped so that two
keys act like these two switches on the Atari 2600 console. 

Keys are also used to substitute for a joystick; the arrow keys do this
by default. The spacebar is the fire button. 

On Windows, the file Stella.html in the "docs" folder gives the complete
key mapping. F1 is SELECT and F2 is RESET.

On the Macintosh, select "Options > Configure Keys ..." from the menu 
bar to see what they key mappings are and to change them if you like.
By default, S is SELECT and R is RESET.

The manuals for the games are highly recommended for those who have not
played Atari 2600 games before.

For convenience, the executable files have been extracted and are ready
to run on the CD, as described. The complete distributions of Stella for
Windows ("cyberstella-1.2.zip") and for Macintosh ("Stella.sit") are
included in the "etc" folder; unzip or unstuff the one for your platform
to find the license information and other necessary files. The current 
version of Stella is distributed under the Gnu Public License. The 
source code for both platforms is also included in the "etc" folder in 
compliance with the GPL.

In the DOCS folder, Stella.html (the Stella manual) contains a brief 
history of Atari that can be very helpful in outlining the rise of home 
video games. Note, however, that this document gives several incorrect 
dates, including the date for the release of Adventure (actually 1978, 
not 1980) and the founding of Activision (actually 1979, not 1980).

-NM