Lakka 2.1.........................
Puzzled about what to do with those old machines that are lurking in your attic? Shashank Sharma suggests using Lakka to turn them into a gaming console.
Shashank Sharma likes classic games as much as the next geek, but doesn’t want to spend all day trying to get emulators working, so he’s found the ideal solution.
As a reviewer, rarely does one come across a distribution that’s an amalgamation of several interesting technologies. Lakka, is the official Linux distro of the RetroArch and the libretro ecosystem. If you haven’t heard of these projects, RetroArch is a lightweight and fast front-end for emulators, game engines, media players and various other applications. All game systems are built as a libretro core, while RetroArch takes care of the inputs and display. While game emulators for Linux aren’t new, most of those projects serve a single gaming system, such as the Nintendo.
What makes Lakka special is its support for a large number of systems such as Nintendo 64, Nintendo Game Boy, Sega Game Gear, Sony PlayStation and Atari 2600. You can find a complete list on the project’s website.
You can essentially turn any machine into a console with just RetroArch and libretro, but Lakka acts as a turnkey solution for using these projects. It offers a compressed IMG file that you must unzip and burn onto a USB device. The project lists a number of tools that you can use for this purpose, depending on the OS that you’re running.
On Linux, you can use the dd command to burn the image onto a USB or SD card. When booting off these devices, Lakka provides two options. Type ‘live’ at the boot prompt to run the Live environment or alternatively type ‘installer’, if you wish to install it to disk. Note, however, that the project requires a dedicated machine and isn’t intended as a dual-boot distro.
If you’ve used Kodi (formerly known as XBMC) before, the interface will be familiar. All the menu entries are listed horizontally across the screen. The various options within each menu are listed vertically. Each of these further provides various tweakable elements. You can alter the audio, video, and controller input settings using the keyboard − Lakka is designed to work with the keyboard and supports a variety of controllers out of the box.
Bear in mind YMMV
The popular acronym for Your Mileage May Vary best describes Lakka’s performance, since it depends on the hardware you wish to run it on. Apart from the system specs, you’ll also have to factor in support for graphics cards and game controllers. The official forums are home to several posts from users describing their inability to run the project on their machines, because of an incompatible graphics card. You can find a list of supported controllers and emulators here: www.lakka.tv/ doc/Hardware-support.
With Samba enabled, you can connect to your network and transfer the ROMs for your favourite games to the Lakka. Alternatively, you can place all ROMs onto a USB drive, and connect it to Lakka. The distro can scan connected devices for workable ROMs and can automatically identify the emulators needed for each game.
The distro is designed to drop you into a graphical environment within a few seconds. If you wish to tweak any default configuration, or want to access the command-line then you can refer to the official documentation, which walks users through the process.
The thoroughly documented project is always on the lookout for information on what hardware works or doesn’t with Lakka. For various systems, the project’s website also describes the performance rating on different devices such as PC or RPi. Depending on your skill levels, you can also serve the project as a developer, designer, tester, documentation writer and so on.