Setting up Lakka on the RetroEngine Sigma
Aug 25, 2017 21:27:06 GMT
kevinw, pewpewpewed, and 1 more like this
Post by wryly on Aug 25, 2017 21:27:06 GMT
A few of us have had a go on Lakka and it's a completely different set up that looks like a PS3 XMB. You can't do anything other than play your games, and you have to install any bios over your network, but roms can either be copied over the network, or just dumped onto a flash drive and plugged into a USB. I use an OTG cable and connect it to the rear micro USB socket, to leave the regular USBs free for controllers.
Just so that it's easy to find, here's a copy of my quick instructions of how to get it up and running. If any others using Lakka want to add tips and tricks that they've discovered to make it's use as painless and enjoyable as possible, it could be useful for noobs and anyone else just wondering what to do.
To install Lakka, prepare your SD card. A freshly FAT32 formatted, fast SD card is ideal. If you decide to use a flashdrive/external SD card in a reader to store your roms, rather than copy them over (which must be done over your network for Lakka), you can use a small SD card, as the image is much smaller than RetrOrangePi (I use an 8gb and that's probably overkill, as Lakka is about 0.5Gb). Once you have your SD card ready, follow the instructions here:
www.lakka.tv/get/
Like RetrOrangePi , Lakka requires additional bios to use some emulators. You can get a pack of those emulators from www.picades.com/ from their repository. The difference in Lakka is that this must be copied to the system folder on the installed SD card, via your network connection (as do the roms to the roms folder, if you want them on that card). To install roms on an external flash/SD, you need to connect your drive and go to the extreme right hand of the menu, where you will see a + sign. Here you can ask it to scan your attached drive. This can take a few hours if you've got thousands of games on here. Once scanned, you can select the various emulators and see the lists of roms available. Some may be listed under a dubious selection e.g. many roms for spectrum games and others were listed under MSX on mine, but when you select 'RUN' if gives you a choice of the most likely emulators it thinks may work, so try to pick the right one. There's no point selecting something just to see what it does and it should be easy to tell which is the correct one.
Lakka can be laborious to go through a long list of games to find a particular title, but if you have the history turned on, a much shorter list, that will soon come to represent your favourites can be browsed quickly.
Another heads up for Lakka. It's default setting is to configure controllers to the Japanese default i.e. the buttons are the wrong way around, which personally does my head in, but this can be corrected with a simple switch in the settings. NB. Sometimes roms that aren't working, or that you may have chosen the wrong emulator for can cause this setting to revert to the default Japanese setting, which can cause much confusion. Watch out for that.
Another warning is if you switch the rom drive for a different one, it will keep the initial list, despite it no longer being connected. If you do want to use a different rom set, first access Lakka over your network and look for a folder of playlists. There will be a file for each emulator, so just delete these before scanning your new drive for roms.
Due to the time scanning takes, I suggest making sure that you have a finished selection of roms before you start. You can add to your collection and just rescan specific folders to add the additions. I don't think that will create duplicates if the drive is otherwise unchanged.
You can find Lakka videos on YouTube. Here are some from the team.
www.youtube.com/channel/UCsFAXPsgzbU-6KRKqumtbXA/videos
Here's what it looks like:
Just so that it's easy to find, here's a copy of my quick instructions of how to get it up and running. If any others using Lakka want to add tips and tricks that they've discovered to make it's use as painless and enjoyable as possible, it could be useful for noobs and anyone else just wondering what to do.
To install Lakka, prepare your SD card. A freshly FAT32 formatted, fast SD card is ideal. If you decide to use a flashdrive/external SD card in a reader to store your roms, rather than copy them over (which must be done over your network for Lakka), you can use a small SD card, as the image is much smaller than RetrOrangePi (I use an 8gb and that's probably overkill, as Lakka is about 0.5Gb). Once you have your SD card ready, follow the instructions here:
www.lakka.tv/get/
Like RetrOrangePi , Lakka requires additional bios to use some emulators. You can get a pack of those emulators from www.picades.com/ from their repository. The difference in Lakka is that this must be copied to the system folder on the installed SD card, via your network connection (as do the roms to the roms folder, if you want them on that card). To install roms on an external flash/SD, you need to connect your drive and go to the extreme right hand of the menu, where you will see a + sign. Here you can ask it to scan your attached drive. This can take a few hours if you've got thousands of games on here. Once scanned, you can select the various emulators and see the lists of roms available. Some may be listed under a dubious selection e.g. many roms for spectrum games and others were listed under MSX on mine, but when you select 'RUN' if gives you a choice of the most likely emulators it thinks may work, so try to pick the right one. There's no point selecting something just to see what it does and it should be easy to tell which is the correct one.
Lakka can be laborious to go through a long list of games to find a particular title, but if you have the history turned on, a much shorter list, that will soon come to represent your favourites can be browsed quickly.
Another heads up for Lakka. It's default setting is to configure controllers to the Japanese default i.e. the buttons are the wrong way around, which personally does my head in, but this can be corrected with a simple switch in the settings. NB. Sometimes roms that aren't working, or that you may have chosen the wrong emulator for can cause this setting to revert to the default Japanese setting, which can cause much confusion. Watch out for that.
Another warning is if you switch the rom drive for a different one, it will keep the initial list, despite it no longer being connected. If you do want to use a different rom set, first access Lakka over your network and look for a folder of playlists. There will be a file for each emulator, so just delete these before scanning your new drive for roms.
Due to the time scanning takes, I suggest making sure that you have a finished selection of roms before you start. You can add to your collection and just rescan specific folders to add the additions. I don't think that will create duplicates if the drive is otherwise unchanged.
You can find Lakka videos on YouTube. Here are some from the team.
www.youtube.com/channel/UCsFAXPsgzbU-6KRKqumtbXA/videos
Here's what it looks like:
