Although there are several distros for retro-gaming, Lakka is, without a doubt, the one that has taken care of all the details the best. That is why it has become the official RetroArch distro. Unlike other systems like RetroPie either recalbox, Lakka is a very stable and fluid distro, optimized with the essentials for retro-gaming and with details (such as control mapping) taken care of and fully optimized.
In addition, it does not use Emulationstation as a frontend, which translates into fewer crashes, fewer control mapping issues, and less resource consumption.
In addition to this optimization, Lakka has a series of features that allow users to enjoy their retro games to the fullest:
- It’s compatible with multiplayer, both locally with up to 5 people, and over the Internet with Netplay.
- Dispose of save spaces to be able to save the game at any time.
- Function “rewind” that allows us to go back a few seconds by pressing a key when we fall into a game over.
- A wide range of shaders to improve the appearance of our classic games.
- The firmware is updated via OTA. From the XMB menu itself we can update all of Lakka and all the cores to the latest versions without losing data.
- Compatible with virtually all types of controls. In addition, it has a mapping function to change the key assignment.
As for the emulators included in Lakka, we will be able to find all kinds of consoles, from the classic ones like the Atari 2600 to much more specific consoles (which have not even reached Spain), consoles like the NES or the Game Boy and consoles relatively modern, like PlayStation or PSP.
The games can be copied to Lakka in several ways. One of the most comfortable is to copy all the games to a directory (for example, to the memory card itself, or to a USB) and use the function of scanning Lakka so that it looks for all the roms that are available. These will be added directly to the xmb menu and they will be classified according to their type. If we want to give a more beautiful aesthetic, we can also download packs of covers or screenshots for each game.
In this way we can find all the roms of each console within its corresponding category. Selecting one of them will automatically load its core and the ROM will start working.
Download and install Lakka
As we have explained, Lakka is based on FreeELEC. Lakka consists of a 300 MB system that is configured from the outset in read-only mode, so whatever we do we cannot break the system, even using root permissions.
The entire system has been built using cross-compilation, so in addition to being fully optimized, it doesn’t have a single unnecessary dependency. This means that, in addition to being fully optimized, it is stable and robust from the outset.
If we want to download Lakka, we can do it for free from the . Here it will ask us what operating system we use to indicate the correct instructions to prepare the distro according to the OS that we have on our PC.
To prepare Lakka, the best way we can choose is to select the device where we are going to use it (for example, a Raspberry Pi, an Odroid, Orange Pie, Banana Pi or a normal PC) and, once the image of the system, in IMG format, use a tool called “etcher” to save the image to a USB or SD card.
If we are not convinced by this program, or it gives us problems, we can also use the well-known Win32DiskImager for Windows in order to save the image to our memory card or flash drive and start this system.
Once the Lakka system has been copied to the memory card or USB, all we have to do is start the computer with it to start using it and be able to play all those classic games again.
Test the development version
One of the problems that we can find when using this system is that it does not usually release new versions very often. Although that does not mean that development is stopped or dead, quite the contrary. Both the project managers and the community often work to continue improving the system and include both the latest version of RetroArch and the latest available cores. And, of course, counting on its own optimizations.
If we want to go ahead of the stable version, we can find the development versions of this system, known as Lakka-Nightly. These versions are updated daily, so we can always have the latest one installed on the device. Of course, being development versions we can find problems or incompatibilities, we must be careful.
Update the distro
When a new version of this system comes out, we do not have to re-flash the memory card or USB from scratch, since, if we do, we will lose the configurations, saved games and games. Lakka has a very simple update system, inspired by LibreELEC itself, which allows us to update both the Kernel or the Bootloader and the cores of the games, or RetroArch itself without any complications.
To do this, we can do it in several ways. The first one is to use the updater itself that we can find in the program’s interface. To do this, we start the system and go to the Online Updater> Update Lakka section, and we will look for the system image that we want to install (taking care with the dates). When the download is finished, we simply reboot the device and, when it boots again, the installation will be carried out.
We can also perform a manual installation by downloading the corresponding img.gz file from the Lakka website, and copying it to the .update directory via SAMBA or FTP. Once copied, we reboot the device and, again, the update will begin.
Finally, if we are going to perform a complete flashing, and we do not want to lose our data, we can do it in a simple way by copying the roms, the saved games, the savestates and the screenshots to the PC, flashing again the image that we want, and restoring those data back to PC.
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