Can you imagine taking an entire emulation system, including games, in your pocket or in your wallet? And how cheap that would be? Well, I'm here to tell you that you can and how you can do it. You just need a USB flash drive! ;)
I present to you: Lakka!!!
Lakka is a complete standalone emulation system based on retroarch. You can install it in a computer and basically turn it into a console, or you can run it directly from a USB flash drive!
For more information about these and other systems, please read my previous article about Retro gaming - affordable arcade experience.
The frontend is just like retroarch and I'm extremely familiar with it. Originally I wanted to try something a little different and visually more appealing. So I started with Recalbox. Extremely beautiful front end (much more than Lakka and retroarch) but I had sound issues with certain emulators, mainly with Final Burn Alpha and MAME. As I couldn't solve them, I decided to come back to my trust worthy Lakka that I knew would work well. Please keep in mind that you might have a different experience if you try Recalbox. So go ahead and try whatever you want because this article applies to both.
The Lakka website guides you through all the necessary steps to download, make a bootable USB flash drive and run it from the drive or install it. It's really easy!
In Lakka you are not forced to have a certain ROM folder structure. You organize your ROMs however you like. You can put them in the same drive as Lakka (for example, your USB flash drive) or in a separate Hard Drive. If you want to take the USB flash drive with you, so you can insert it into any PC and play your games anywhere, you must have your ROMs in the same drive, of course. But in my case, I have the ROMs stored in this PC I'm writing this article on, the Darth Maximus, and when I want to play some emulated games I just start my computer through my USB flash drive. But Lakka/retroarch might be a little less intuitive for you to run your ROMs. Since the ROMs are not stored in a certain folder structure, the system won't rely on folder names to know which ROM belongs to each system. If it somehow is able to identify a certain game/file/ROM, it will categorize that game and put it in a menu that belongs to a certain console/computer/arcade. Because of this, you might have 1000 games for a certain console and it will just be able to identify some and put them on that menu. This means that you will have to load all the other games manually. It's actually not that bad as you get used to it and once you play a certain ROM, whichever it is, it will be in a menu, on the most recent games you have played.
Recalbox, for example, has a certain directory structure and this makes it easier/faster to find your ROMs for a certain console/computer/arcade. This is also why I wanted to try Recalbox.
The reason why I put my ROMs in a separate HD is because I don't plan to take the emulation system with me, and also for a matter of convenience. This system, as others, is done in Linux and unfortunately my Toshiba laptop's graphics card (running Linux Mint) decided to crap on me. To copy ROMs to the USB flash drive, I need to run it in another computer and transfer these ROMs through LAN. The thing is, for whatever reason, transferring files was not working right. I mean, some files would get transferred and then, it just stopped and acted like it couldn't detect the PC anymore. I had to wait a bit for it to get detected again. And then, accessing other folders was fine, but trying to access the folder where I was copying the files was problematic too. I don't know if it has anything to do with the SAMBA protocol and Windows 10... If I had my Linux machine, I would just insert the USB flash drive and copy the ROMs directly to it...
In Recalbox you can also choose to have your ROMs in a different drive and it will create the necessary directory structure automatically in that drive.
Also, I noticed that Recalbox uses much more system resources than Lakka. If you have an old machine, the interface might be laggy and ROMs might not run at the desired frame rate. This reason alone, for you, might be the deciding factor to run Lakka.
Lakka allows you such a deep level of configuration and customization and because of that it might be a little daunting at first. But once you get used to it, it's awesome!
It just works well, games run great, it's reliable, uses few resources and has no issues.
Both Lakka and Recalbox allow the use of shadders so you can improve the image quality of your ROMs or even play them with those typical scanlines from old CRT monitors/TVs. And why not do both? You choose!
Although the website states that Lakka is still under heavy development, it's basically a standalone retroarch system and I found it to be extremely reliable with excellent performance. Try it, and you won't be disappointed.
Usefull links
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