Soon as a godsent I noticed Puppy Arcade had out of nowhere received an official update to version 11, which I was eager to download just to notice the download link was yet to work. Fortunately all I needed to do was to give it an hour.
I'm a newbie at Linux in general and it took a while setting it up, but Puppy Arcade 11 (k2.6.25.16) has turned an old IBM Thinkpad T30 that was crumbling under its own weight into a full-fledged oldschool gaming machine (and region-free DVD-player) capable of taking advantage of its S-video output for traditional CRT monitors.
On top of that is the new Rom-Loader looking really great and comes with some very neat features.
Now, the computer isn't actually mine, so I don't have immediate access to it. I am also writing all of this based on what I'm remembering.
Still, aside from the batteries not charging, (I don't know if they simply decided to die the very moment I tried out Linux) there're some optional issues I'd like to express incase there's an answer:
- Firstly, it's about graphic drivers. The featured version of MESA/Xorg driver (installed through the 'zzx_upgrade_73_to_75_nokms-201101-1'" has unfortunately a color/gamma bug of some sort when running on 16-bit color depth with older ATI graphic chips. I'd describe it as the the screen being a really darkish green color, while the mouse cursor itself is unaffected.
24-bit color depth works, but it's a bit unfortunate as it's leeching some valuable performance. The computer's graphic chip is a Radeon R100, or specifically, branded as ATI Mobility Radeon 7500.
Also, when running emulators on hardware acceleration through OpenGL, the screen may remain black while the emulation itself continues. It's solved by restarting the emulator, but is there a more direct known way of dealing with this problem?
Secondly, I guess the reason why xboxdrv doesn't come packed with Puppy Arcade is because the very man himself behind it doesn't possess an actual 360 pad? Trying to install it myself has only ended in a failure.
Eitherway, I think if it came packed with the OS, it could make many people happy since it supports many 3rd party gamepads.
The default joypad driver, on the other hand, seems unable to properly translate more than 6 axises as representatives, whereas the regular Xbox 360 pad seems to exceed this with 8. Practically this means the analog axises (including the dpad) are bugged. 3rd party variants of the 360 pad like Razer Onza and the PC exclusive Logitech Chillstream won't function at all.
Although, Thrustmaster Dual Analog 4 worked flawlessly when I tried it on Puppy Arcade 10, so I'm confident it should work just fine on version 11.
Thirdly, even though the Rom-Loader is a light-weight frontend in general, I'm experiencing a temporary freeze lag during rapid Rom browsing in the Rom-browser when holding the arrow key up/down. Is this perhaps just a general issue when having box art download enabled? Like I said, I'm currently unable to test this myself.
Also, is there any ways of hiding specific ROMs in the Rom-browser? MAME games tend to consist of multiple dependencies, which can be annoying as it clutters up the library with unnecessary files.
I'd also like to provide some feedback on the Rom-Loader frontend:
- For a starter it seems the BIOS downloader has incorrectly routed its download path (except from Amiga), so I had to find the downloaded file and install it manually myself.
Then about the joypad only navigation – is the Rom-Loader supposed to load the romloader.cfg automatically upon a fresh start? I had to enter settings and load it manually for every hard reboot to enable joypad only navigation. For it to function with joypad only navigation at start, I had to create a startup script that loaded Rejoystick at first and then gave a 5 seconds delay before executing the Rom-Loader.
Since the laptop is configured to clone the primary screen to the TV-out, the standard resolution is set to 800x600. Although, the Rom-Loader could use two improvements at a resolution this low:
In Joypad Controls, the Rejoystick keyboard mapper window blocks the view of the profile description. It would be nice if it could appear more to the left. The text in the Rom-browser is also too small for a traditional 21" TV. Perhaps the latter could have a specific setting for this?
And finally for the most important part – I want to thank you for spending time on Puppy Arcade and also for surprising us with a major update with a lot of improvements over the previous versions. Now I'm personally also falling behind with my own work when I was learning Linux for the sake of setting up Puppy Arcade on the ol' stinkpad, but I guess that's just simply the way when one has a passion for other things but the studies.
Cheers.