Puppy Arcade 8

[sc0ttman]

Puppy Arcade 9 is now out...

Get Puppy Arcade 9 here


Older version below:

Puppy Arcade 8
the retro gaming puplet - homepage

Download: Mirror 1 (updated)

md5: eed91c5dcd38ac8ad9991cd9429f24f0

Reviews:

Review on Openbytes
http://retro-replay.com/2010/07/puppy-arcade-8-review/

Summary:

Upgraded emulators, easier to use, more help, with a quick start dialog, a browser
installer, automatic BIOS and frontend downloaders, default emulator choosers
and a lovely all-in-one, cabinet-friendly, multi-emulator rom-loader!

(Based on TurboPup Xtreme, Puppy 4.2, kernel 2.6.25.16)

Important Changes:

Puppy Arcade now has its own custom-built frontends for many emulators, which
have all been integrated into the most important new app, 'Rom-Loader', which
supports fullscreen, joypad navigation, rom-browsing, emulator settings and more.

More emulators are included than before, including 3 new 'Apple Mac' emulators,
while others have either been upgraded (SDLMAME replaces GxMAME) or they've
had their frontends improved.

When launching your emulators from either Wbar or the start menu, you can choose
which emulators or frontends are loaded by default. Which emulator/frontend you
choose is up to you, and can be controlled by the 'Frontend-Chooser' tool.

The 'Rom-Loader' frontends replace the default emulator frontends where possible,
although this can be changed back easily with the "Frontend-Chooser".

The ISO is only 105mb! This means lots of things had to go or have been replaced by
smaller alternatives. For example, a browser installer has been included, and no browser
is installed by default! You'll need to choose which browser you want when you boot.

All BIOS files have been removed, including the files included in previous versions.
But a simple BIOS file downloader is now availiable, to get you started more quickly.

Lastly, VLC 0.8.6h and VLC-GTK have replaced Gxine and xine, as VLC supports more
filetypes, has great subtitle support and is very fast, even on old PCs. Pmusic is of course
included, while MOC and xmp are included for CLI audio playback of even more files.

Thanks:

Thanks to all the lovely people who helped me on this.. You know who you are!

sc0ttman
.

[sc0ttman]

Additional Emulators and Files (optional):

MAMEPGUI - lovely frontend for SDLMAME

ZSNES 1.51 - alternative SNES emulator, use this if SNES9x is no good for you..

iNES - simple, reliable NES emulator

Zinc Emulator - emulator for (mainly) Namco arcade games such as Soul Edge, Rival Schools, Star Gladiator etc..

Yabause - SEGA Saturn emulator

SpectEmu - simple, alternative ZX Spectrum emulator.

MasterGear - simple and fast SEGA MasterSystem and GameGear emulator

Mednafen plus MednafenFE - multi sega emulator. Requires OpenGL.

GnGeo - fast NeoGeo emulator, no frontend

pSX - very accurate, fast PSX emulator.. Requires both OpenGL and Sony PSX BIOS!

MSX emulators - 2 MSX emulators, and the required MSX BIOS files

Commodore Manual - LOADS of stuff on how to use the commodore

USB Installer for Windows - easily create a bootable USB stick with the Puppy Arcade ISO

[sc0ttman]

Puppy Arcade 8 - changelog and details

Packages added:

drivers
- wacom tablet

libs (and extra symlinks)
- crypto
- cups
- faad
- fltk
- gc
- gnocl, tcl,tk
- gnomecanvas, gnomecanvasmm, gnomeprint
- xorg_xfbdev-7.3-1
- pulse audio
- seamonkey libs
- ncurses

system
- floppy-formatter-1.7
- acpid 1.0.10-1 (thanks to shinobar)
- autonet 100209 (thanks to shinobar)
- pupremaster (dougals, fixed)
- remasterpup2-100120 (thanks to shinobar)
- StartMount 0.5.1
- sysinfobox 1.0

emulation
- SDLMAME 1.36
- E-UAE WIP4
- basilisk, sheepshaver, minivmav
- scummvm 1.0
- fceu 0.98.12
- rom-loader (huge thanks to zigbert)
- bios-checker
- frontend-chooser
- rejoystick control centre
- quickstart
- saturn emulator chooser
- mame frontend chooser
- apple emulator chooser
- new commodre chooser
- new osmose frontend - now "rom-browser" compatible

utils
- pbackup
- rover (thanks to jemimah)
- browser-installer (thanks to 01micko)
- defaults-changer (plus MANY new default**** files)
- wish tcl-tk apps - filerusher, burn, supernotepad, finance (thanks to pa-mcclamrock)
- smaller petget GUI


multimedia
- vlc 0.8.6h and vlc-gtk 1.8 (thanks to ttuuxxx and dejan555)
- moc player 2.4.3
- bashburn 3.0
- burn2iso 2
- pburn 3.2.5
- pmusic 0.9.9.4
- ffconvert 0.6
- mp3info 0.8.5a
- retrovol 0.7
- pupRadio 0.5.5
- xmp 3.1.0

internet
- CLInet 0.7
- pnetlive 0.2
- netsetup 20100310 (thanks to shinobar)
- you2pup 1.4
- streamripper 1.64-4
- StreamSniff

Packages Removed:

- Gxine and xine libs
- E-UAE WIP3
- ScummVM 0.9
- Gxmame
- Seamonkey
- Abiword, aiksaurus, Gnumeric, Inkscape, etc
- CUPS
- Sane
- Gutenprint
- Pwidgets
- Ptray
- Pnethood
- Samba
- GtkBasic Demos
- MuppyFiler
- MuppyQuickMount
- Others

Bug Fixes:

- Unexpected shutdown now fine with HD installs (thanks rfxcasey)
- Removed lots of junk and some duplicate files!
- Right-click wallpaper-changer is now working perfectly
- Fixed PetGet - now never crashes when installing PETs without .desktop files
- fixed the Xvesa mtpaintsnaphot hotkey bug, when 'UP' was pressed

[sc0ttman]

I'm re-uploading due to a small error - the default frontend chooser did not find Gens, making it a real pain in the ass to load the Gens emulator itself.. This has been fixed and an updated version has been uploaded.

[tikbalang]

thank you for the update!

[Gee]

Wow amazing OS. Thank you.

I tested the psx emulator on my vaio fz140, it ran well.

[P123]

Great now I can play my PSone games without fiddle about with wires & cables to hook up my little beige box to my new lcd tv.

This is the only recent puplet to realise that on the UK keyboard the " is above 2 and the @ sign is above the ' not the other way around.

As for the choice of web browser you have included more than lucid and I found that I really like Icecat, but not sure when I would use the text only browsers you included in the list as well.

Just one question how do I increase the volume as there is no icon on the task bar?

[sc0ttman]

Just one question how do I increase the volume as there is no icon on the task bar?

Open up either Sgmixer or retrovol from the start menu

(menu->multimedia->retrovol)...

Retrovol will put an icon in the taskbar once its loaded...

[P123]

Thanks sc0ttman, I'll give that a try later as I am downloading an .iso which will take approximately 5 hours.

[sc0ttman]

Puppy Arcade 8 has been reviewed (well) on OpenBytes

Here is the link

http://openbytes.wordpress.com/2010/05/ ... ecd-105mb/

Added to the mian post as well..

[stray]

thanks for the great, evolving package..
I'd really love a .sfs that could be used with 4.3.1+.. I'm a bit too busy to boot a different distro for specific app areas such as this, but would love to run Mame (one of the only emulators I use) while multitasking with all the customizations I've accumulated on my old-standby Puppy version. Actually I don't even know about TurboPup.. there's so many puplets now that i just cant keep up.

Trying the latest SDLmame should be interesting.. Gxmame seems long since abandoned and I recently tried the latest Mame32 (or whatever the Winbloze verison is called now) and wow, it kicked butt as far as dealing with differently-named romsets. Remembering back to previous versions of SDL, it seemed quite slow, which is what I then read about it as a general complaint.

[sc0ttman]

You can download all these emulators separately from http://ppm.scottjarvis.com

[camelorange]

This is surely a great puplet, and I really like it.

I've installed it on my Eee PC 1000HA. There is just one annoying problem: whenever I started an app, the screen goes to full brightness. I recall that I met the same issue when I tried another puplet (Puppeee) . Both Arcade and Puppeee are based on Puppy 4.x, so is this problem due to Puppy 4.x itself? How can I fix it?

And also, since lupu is out now, will there be a Puppy Arcade 9 based on lupu? ^_^

[sc0ttman]

This is surely a great puplet, and I really like it.

Good

I've installed it on my Eee PC 1000HA. There is just one annoying problem: whenever I started an app, the screen goes to full brightness. I recall that I met the same issue when I tried another puplet (Puppeee)

This is indeed an issue on the Eee PC.. (I've got the same one as you)..
Jemimah has updated Puppeee a lot since I last downloaded it..
I just use the old Puppeee beta2 - does what I want...

I don't know if this brightness issue has been improved or fixed.
I recommend checking out the Puppeee thread and website - you'll find more info on that issue there..

However, I do have one suggestion, but cannot tell you how to do it.. yet:

Make all the brightness levels the same, in whatever file stores the brightness levels...
Again, the Puppeee thread will have some helpful info about this somewhere..

And also, since lupu is out now, will there be a Puppy Arcade 9 based on lupu? ^_^

Probably not.. I like TurboPup as a base, because it uses so little RAM and ZERO CPU when you're not doing stuff
This makes the ROMs playable on as many systems as possible (old and new)...

However, I will release an SFS file containing all the emulators, Rom-Loader, Rejoystick, etc.. some time in the (not immediate) future..

The SFS could be added to whatever version of Puppy people like..

[sc0ttman]

3559 downloads in 14 days.. That's 254 downloads a day, on average..

Yet this thread is so quiet! I'll assume all is working well...

[tikbalang]

is it possible to rename pup_420arcade.sfs (and other future .sfs file/s) into an 8.3 filename? i frugal install to fat32 so i can start puppy arcade like a DOS app.

[ICPUG]

It would seem that with this latest Arcade one MUST have internet access via Puppy to get the bits to make things work. Two queries.

You say there is NO browser so you have to choose one. How do you download one with no browser to start with. Does it use an ftp app or something?

Is it possible to download the bits needed using another OS and then install them into the Arcade system? To do this would need to know the address of where the stuff is. Is this possible to find in the scripts/elesewhere?

[sc0ttman]

It would seem that with this latest Arcade one MUST have internet access via Puppy to get the bits to make things work. Two queries.

You say there is NO browser so you have to choose one. How do you download one with no browser to start with. Does it use an ftp app or something?

Is it possible to download the bits needed using another OS and then install them into the Arcade system? To do this would need to know the address of where the stuff is. Is this possible to find in the scripts/elesewhere?

There is a browser installer tool which uses wget to download the PET file of your choice..

(Wget is a download tool built into Puppy, it will download loads of stuff for you easily.. )

I have basically kept up with the latest Puppy developments, in that a browser choice and additional software can be downloaded easily after bootup..

This was done to give more choice and keep the ISO size down, which keeps growing as more systems are emulated

You can get all the files found in Puppy Arcade 8 from http://ppm.scottjarvis.com

is it possible to rename pup_420arcade.sfs (and other future .sfs file/s) into an 8.3 filename? i frugal install to fat32 so i can start puppy arcade like a DOS app.

I will see what I can do, although changing the name of the main sfs file will mess up save files from other versions, but I dn't think that will be an issue..

[ICPUG]

Thanks for the answer scottman.

I understand why you have done this but I personally dislike this approach of having to go online with Puppy to get extra stuff. Apart from it not working out of the box the sfs or pet approach is more helpful because you can download these with anything (or put them on a CD distribution). Needless to say I cannot easily go online with Puppy now. My dialup modem no longer works and my broadband has a usb modem (speedtouch 330) which works with Windows 9x or XP (not Windows 7 so I have a problem there as well). I know I could buy some hardware to solve it but it was fine before and now Puppy Linux is following the Windows route of making it harder to keep old stuff working and hiding information (behind a pretty front end) to solve my particular need. I've nothing against the pretty front ends for the technically deficient but I kinda like the info as well so that the technically proficient can continue working as well!

As to making the size of the iso smaller that is really putting on a false face. Yes, the iso is smaller but it doesn't provide the intent of the puplet! In order to make it work you need to get some more stuff. You have to download the larger amount anyway. It is no different having to dowload a 150MB iso than having to download a 100MB iso and 50MB of add-ons.

I'm not criticising you scottman. It is the whole process of demanding that people must be connected to the internet with broadband to get all they need to make their software work as expected! We are isolating those caught the other side of the digital divide.

[sc0ttman]

Thanks for the answer scottman.

... I personally dislike this approach of having to go online with Puppy to get extra stuff.

Firstly, I understand entirely, I tried to make sure all addons were optional.

So technically, in PA8 you don't have to go online and download anything.
Everything required to emulate roms is present by default, besides BIOS files of course.
They are optional extras, such as browser, more exotic emulators, larger MAME frontends, .

Apart from it not working out of the box the sfs or pet approach is more helpful because you can download these with anything (or put them on a CD distribution).

Again, it all works out of the box - except browser.
I may include Dillo as default next time, for the dialup crowd, like your good self.
Do you have a Dillo pet lying around? I can post one here..

Needless to say I cannot easily go online with Puppy now. My dialup modem no longer works and my broadband has a usb modem

Just a thought, but I take my USB stick to a local internet cafe when I can't get connected at home.
If I need to download something large or important, it's quick and easy.
But if you have no internet cafes nearby, that is a dumb idea

I know I could buy some hardware to solve it but it was fine before and now Puppy Linux is following the Windows route of making it harder to keep old stuff working and hiding information (behind a pretty front end) to solve my particular need.

Puppy Arcade is still based on 4.2, I have not updated the base, if you were wondering.
Which version was the last to work with your hardware?
Also, I added CLInet ( a console network tool) to v8, maybe that'll help..

As to making the size of the iso smaller that is really putting on a false face. Yes, the iso is smaller but it doesn't provide the intent of the puplet! In order to make it work .. you have to download the larger amount anyway.

Again, you don't need any of the addons to play roms, except the BIOS.
So the intent of the puplet is not lost, I think..
They simply add a few more features and GUIs, if users want them.

I'm not criticising you scottman. It is the whole process of demanding that people must be connected to the internet with broadband to get all they need to make their software work as expected! We are isolating those caught the other side of the digital divide.

No offence taken at all.. I agree with you that forcing people to download stuff to get things working as expected is not good.

I think I got the balance right here - I can't include any BIOS.
Only the browser could be called a big fat omission
But with Dillo only 600kb, easily added through the browser-installer, I think it's not too bad.