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Dommer416
Aug 4, 2013

Hello little children your uncle is here.
First, here is a link to the OS.

https://www.lakka.tv

http://www.lakka.tv/videos/menu.mp4 <-- what the OS looks like

If you have not yet heard of Lakka, it is an OS centered around retro gaming. Packed with it are a set of emulators for famicom, nes, snes, PS, Genisis, and few others. As the OS is matured more and more I assume that more emulators will be added. Since it is a linux distro I guess you could also add Dosbox and whatever else you wanted installed on the set of hardware you wanted to put it onto.

As it is now it isn't meant for desktops as a normal user would have, though a virtual machine or KVM slot could certainly be used for it. Why not just get visualboy advance to play pokemon? I dunno. Currently mini-PC type systems are available for install, making that Raspberry pi the perfect thing to use for gaming.

Not only the pi is supported though, pi 2, PCDuino, and other types of mini-PC's are useable with the distro. The site has very well set instructions for windows, mac,. and linux users for installation of the OS on SD cards depending on the users system (now if only there were BSD specific instructions :P).

There is also support for basic PC controllers, as well as xbox 360 and playstation controllers so that users don't have to go out and buy new ones that were specifically assigned for the OS.

Personally, right now my PSP does good emulation for me and I have systems for other games. While I may not use this right now, someday I will have a nice big flatscreen TV and I'll want to play a slew of NES games. I can see myself using this OS in the future.

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Not Wolverine
Jul 1, 2007
Looks interesting, although I am not at all a fan of the websites graphical design style. The icons in the preview just look weird and the color choices are horrible, but of course that has little do with the rest of the project.

What I like most about the idea is the ability to use a regular PC, a Pi is awesome but you have to connect everything via USB so you need a powered hub with a wifi dongle hanging off, some sort of mass storage solution, and a USB port for each controller, all crammed into a custom made box. . . Which would all be easier to do with a mini-itx PC, and a regular PC could handle gamecube or wii emulation.

Dommer416
Aug 4, 2013

Hello little children your uncle is here.

Crotch Fruit posted:

Looks interesting, although I am not at all a fan of the websites graphical design style. The icons in the preview just look weird and the color choices are horrible, but of course that has little do with the rest of the project.

What I like most about the idea is the ability to use a regular PC, a Pi is awesome but you have to connect everything via USB so you need a powered hub with a wifi dongle hanging off, some sort of mass storage solution, and a USB port for each controller, all crammed into a custom made box. . . Which would all be easier to do with a mini-itx PC, and a regular PC could handle gamecube or wii emulation.

As I said it is linux, so it could be edited as such. Also I assume that more additions will be added later on. It is definately something to look forward to :3

evol262
Nov 30, 2010
#!/usr/bin/perl
The biggest advantage this has is that it presumably ships reasonable configs for zsnes/mame/etc out of the box that someone will eventually steal. They should unironically package this stuff up into a docker image instead of targeting embedded boards for people who want to play retro games in their TV with their friends once a year before the novelty wears off and they go back to xbone4u or whatever's cool in gaming now

Dommer416
Aug 4, 2013

Hello little children your uncle is here.
Honestly when I move into an apartment in a year or two this will be on my pi and will be often used :P

Not Wolverine
Jul 1, 2007
I tested this first on my Rasspberry Pi, and it worked ok with the exception of not recognizing my Logitech F310, the website implies it is supported and my older Logitech controller works but not the F310. What I immediately noticed is that the Pi did not support as many systems as I was hoping for: http://www.lakka.tv/doc/Hardware-support/ Really, looking at that hardware support chart is underwhelming, it supports a lot of devices but most of those devices do not support Playstation or N64 emulation.

I installled Lakka on a flash drive for my HP DM1z, and realized that I cant navigate the menus. The arrow keys work, but the enter key does not do anything. I could plug in a controller, but I want to be able to use the keyboard. . . Looking over the website a bit more I discovered that they recommend using SSH or a Linux PC to access the file system of Lakka, and wifi is not supported, and in 2015 I am not running an ethernet cable out to my TV. I want to like this OS but it's going to be kinda difficult to work with it. The main thing I want to do is remove a lot of the more obscure emulators from the menu (and possibly from the system too 'cause why not?). I have no desire to ever play wonderswan or virtual boy games, all I want is NES, SNES, N64, PSX and a maybe a few handheld systems.

YouTuber
Jul 31, 2004

by FactsAreUseless
Why use this instead of Retropie? Not only does Retropie look more polished, it's an extremely active project.

Not Wolverine
Jul 1, 2007
Well I can not get anything to work on my laptop. I plugged in the F310 and it said "joypad/0 recognized" (or whatever the correct text is) but none of the buttons worked, I tried with the switch on the back in the X and D (I believe Xbox and Direct X mode) and it didn't work. My older Logitech Dual Action controller works, but the OS has issues. I attempted to run what I believe is a preloaded game and it simply flashed a black screen and went back to the menu. In fact, I'm pretty sure the OS is like resetting itself a lot, sometimes I am in the middle of something and the screen goes black for a couple seconds then I am back at the default menu option.

That said, I want to like Lakka, I think it looks very promising and pretty good for it's current state. I can understand that wifi is in progress and really it's not completely necessary. I do believe there needs to be a way to access a terminal or some way to access the file system locally, maybe even only allow access to a rom folder. I also believe the menus need sub menus, or maybe even hide some of the setting in config files, the video options menu has a ton of settings which I believe most people will never need. Similarly, in the input settings, the first thing I see is "number of players: 13" and this can not be adjusted, then below I see about 5 or 6 options for player 0, more options for player 1 and so on up to player 13 - that menu is a bitch to scroll through and 13 players is just :lol: . I want to like this project, it's just obviously in a very early state.

*edit* after watching a video about retro arch I realize why the menus in Lakka are the way they are. . .

Not Wolverine fucked around with this message at 18:30 on May 18, 2015

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QwertySanchez
Jun 19, 2009

a wacky guy
I've just recently set up an old laptop to run this, I originally wanted to use retroarch and emulationstation on windows but my laptop didn't like either of them. Honestly it emulates games fine but it looks ugly as sin, I'd be using openelec if I could find an emulator that works with it now it's changed from xmbc to kodi. If you don't like the way it looks you can go into settings>drivers> then change the Menu driver to rgui (the old menus, a low res chequered square with the menu on top) or glui (which is pretty swish but still just text, also for some reason this one goes off the edge of my screen and I haven't figured out how to make it fit)

edit: My biggest gripes are that to put roms on it you have to access it via lan, for some reason it won't shop up to my main pc but will to my other laptop, so I had to use Winscp to get into it to add roms. It's bullshit that there isn't some menu to just pull stuff off of an external drive onto the hard drive. And that if you, say, don't want to use Xbox360 controllers with it and want to use some older controllers that give it a more retro feel, you lose the option to have a button combo to press to bring up the menu. R3+L3 is fine but not Start+Select?

QwertySanchez fucked around with this message at 18:13 on Aug 7, 2015

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