Puppy Arcade 8 Review

Puppy Arcade 8. Bringing Emulation to a distribution near you. Feel free to read the Interview with Creator Scott Jarvis here. Emulator front ends and Live distribution CD’S have come a long way since the days of Knoppix and TuxNES.

Knoppix being the first Live CD I ever used, TuxNES the first NES emulator. We have come a long way indeed. We now have Live distributions that are emulation orientated in nature and built/configured to run emulators (emulators play video games, many old classics) acting as the ultimate fronted, on the fly even. Yes, enter Puppy Arcade 8. The latest and greatest creation by Scott Jarvis.

Puppy arcade is based off of Puppy Linux, a light weight and very fast Linux distro. Puppy Arcade fly’s. Nothing like having the ability to play all of your favorite games from one source. Puppy Arcade emulates several systems such as:

Amiga (500, 1000, 2000), Atari (ST, 800, 800XL, 130XE, 5200), Amstrad (CPC, Plus, VEB), Arcades, Colecovision, Commodore (64, 128, VIC20, PET), GameBoys (GB, GBC, GBA), GameGear, Genesis/MegaDrive, MasterSystem, MS DOS, N64, NeoGeo, NeoGeo CD, NES/Famicom, PC Engine/TurboGrafix, PSX, ScummVM, SNES and ZX Spectrum (16k, 48k, 128k, +2, +2A, +3) & more!

You have the ability to run this as a Live CD like I said, meaning all you have to do is burn the ISO to a disc and pop it in your Computer and its up and running. You can also make it from a boot-able USB stick, or install it completely. I know Linux has not really been known for its gaming, but retro gaming and Linux work very well together. Who needs High Profile Game Developers when you can have thousands upon thousands of classics at your disposal in seconds.

If you are new to Linux, better yet new to emulation, this might be your best rout. It makes both subjects painless. Puppy arcade is tiny in size for what its worth. A whopping 105mb. This thing is light weight and extremely quick. Once you boot up its running in RAM. Its very fast. Running an OS in RAM is like going from 56k to a T3. You can load this bad boy up on a USB stick and carry it around with you if need be.

You wont find any roms (the games) here or with the installation, but it does come packed with all of the emulators needed to play them. We here at Retro-Replay do NOT endorse roms. There are some bios files as well that we can not endorse, such as the PSX bios, which you need to play PSX games properly.

The distro its self gives you the ability to chose which browser you want to install now, as well as a new rom loader that looks pretty slick. I fired this thing up last night and must say I was shocked. I may do a lot of emulated gaming on my windows PC over nix, but this is the best all in one package I have seen, and it just makes every thing easy and once again fun. Map your controller up and ditch the keyboard and you can relive your glory days playing Mario Brothers for the NES all over again. A solid A+.

What are you waiting for? Go after Puppy Arcade 8. Visit the official site here and get started.