stella mit Homebrew, apt, Nix, pacman, winget installieren

Projektlinks

• Homepage
• Repository

Befehle und Aliase

• stella

Projektgeschichte

The official manual says Bradford W. Mott started developing Stella in fall 1995 and that Stephen Anthony has maintained the project since around 2004. The official site describes Stella as a freely distributed Atari 2600 VCS emulator originally developed for Linux and now maintained by Stephen Anthony.

The project has grown from a Linux emulator into a multi-platform application. The official manual describes it as portable across systems using SDL, 64-bit and endian clean on Linux/Unix, macOS, and Windows, and the GitHub repository was created in October 2016 to host the modern source and release workflow.

Adoptionsgeschichte

The input package metadata lists Stella in Homebrew, Debian, Nix, Arch, Ubuntu, and WinGet. That breadth fits the project history: Stella is both a retro-gaming application and a long-lived open-source emulator that downstream package managers can ship for desktop users.

The official downloads page provides platform-specific binaries and source archives, while the manual documents both graphical operation and command-line invocation with `stella [options ...] ROM_FILENAME`.

Wie es verwendet wird

Common usage is to launch Stella with an Atari 2600 ROM image through its ROM launcher or from the command line. Its user data is stored in a `stella.sqlite3` database at platform-specific locations, and command-line options can override settings stored in that database.

Warum Paket-Nerds sich dafür interessieren

Package nerds care about Stella because it represents the classic emulator packaging problem: a GUI application that also has command-line behavior, per-platform support files, and long-running upstream releases. It is a useful test of how well package managers handle desktop apps, documentation, data directories, and legal boundaries around ROM files.

Its age also matters. A project that began in the 1990s and still ships releases through modern package systems shows how retrocomputing software can survive multiple build systems, operating-system transitions, and distribution channels.

Zeitleiste

• 1995: Bradford W. Mott started developing Stella.
• 1999: Official manual dates its user guide history from February 1999.
• 2004: Stephen Anthony became maintainer around this period.
• 2016: Modern GitHub repository created.
• 2026: Official manual identifies Release 8.0.

Related projects

• Stella is related to Atari 2600 emulation, SDL-based portable desktop software, and retrocomputing package collections.

Quellen

• https://raw.githubusercontent.com/stella-emu/stella/master/README.md
• https://stella-emu.github.io/
• https://stella-emu.github.io/docs/index.html
• https://stella-emu.github.io/downloads.html
• input.source_facts.package-manager