In the past few months, I’ve been thinking about setting up a place in my home where I could play video games from my youth. Having no time and money to invest in buying old consoles, emulation came as the best solution for me. Great emulators exist for the systems I mostly care about: NES, GameBoy, SNES, Sega Genesis and Nintendo 64. I wanted the whole installation process to be as painless as possible, I wanted good emulation performance, and most of all, I wanted the system to be very easy to use. As a bonus came portability, and I’ll talk about it in a few lines.

1.511mb lakka installed. 2.29gb for ROMs. But after making new partition lakka doesn't work properly as before,it can't save configuration and can't access PC's HDD or neither the other partition of pendrive. It would be really nice if I can install lakka and store ROMs on the same pendrive,so I can plug and play anywhere,SO CONVENIENT. Thanks for the response. However I don't see why you'd need that many partitions. Isn't Switchroot the only sofware that relies on partitions. I am pretty sure my main card has only the main partition and it works with lakka, sx os, and hekate flawlessly.

RetroPie and Lakka: emulation kings

While searching for an emulation Linux distribution, I found RetroPie, a nice Raspbian-based distro built to turn your RaspberryPi into a retro gaming emulation machine. I already own several RaspberryPi, and didn’t feel to invest in yet another one. Then I thought: “Do I want to dedicate one of my computers to this task?”. The answer was “no”. There came Lakka, a distribution that promises to turn almost any computer into an old school gaming machine. Nice! More than that: you don’t have to install it. You can leave it on a USB flash drive, and carry it with your controllers to play wherever you go. That’s even better!

A USB thumb drive and controllers is all you’ll need

One of my goals in all this was to invest as little as possible. So no new box of any kind as any computer already in the house will do, and no new expensive hardware like external hard drives. One thing though, my old USB controllers had only the four basic buttons, no start or select buttons, and their d-pads were really not the best. After reading people’s comments on Reddit and Amazon, I decided to go with two refurbished Logitech Gamepad F310 that arrived with minor scratches, but I really don’t care at all as they work like new. I was told and also read that these two other models will do a fantastic job (and in fact, Lakka supports a very long list of controllers natively):

Kingston HyperX Savage – Perfect for portable emulation

Next, you’ll need a USB flash drive on which to copy an image of Lakka. Almost any USB drive will do the trick, at least for older console emulators like NES and SNES. But if you’re looking for maximum performance while going with portable option like I did, a USB 3.0 drive, optimized for random 4KB read/write will give you the best results. Here’s an excellent choice based on several online benchmarks: the Kingston HyperX Savage 64GB.

Download Lakka

Now you’ll need to copy an image of Lakka to the USB flash drive. Simply visit Lakka’s website and follow their easy instructions.

Copy Lakka on the USB thumb drive

For this job, whether you are on Windows, Linux or MacOS, I truly recommend using Etcher. This visual tool is the easiest to use, and you don’t even have to install it. Two easy steps and it copies any system image on a USB thumb drive or SD card.

Copy your roms

Your newly created Lakka system is ready, but it’s missing ROMs. I’ll suppose you already have some, and whether they are legal or not is none of my business. Connect the USB drive to the computer where your ROMs reside. You’ll see two partitions on the drive. The first one holds the operating system. The second is much more Lakka related, and has a “roms” folder at its root. Just copy all your ROM files in there, organized or not. Follow Lakka’s documentation to make the system scan for new ROMs. Lakka will automatically show gaming console menus for the ROMs it finds, hence, no need to install any emulator, they are already good to go!

Boot from the USB thumb drive and start playing

Take your Lakka thumb drive and connect it to the computer you want to play on. Boot the computer, and access its boot menu or BIOS/UEFI by pressing the F2 or del key when a message on the screen says to do so. If you can’t find how to do it, you’ll most likely find the answer with simple googling. From your computer’s boot menu, find and select your USB thumb drive and boot from it. When Lakka’s screen appears, decide whether you simply want to launch Lakka (portable mode) or install it on the computer. Connect your gaming controllers, if not done already. Then a confirmation message will appear at the bottom of the screen with your controller’s model name in it.

There you go! If you have any question at this point, I suggest you read Lakka’s documentation but everything should run pretty smoothly.

It is necessary to access the Lakka filesystem in order to accomplish tasks such as adding ROMs or BIOSes. Access to the filesystem also makes it possible to content like screenshots or savefiles from Lakka. There are two overall approaches to gaining access to the Lakka filesystem:

Network access
Attaching the Lakka drive to another system

Lakka Os Iso

Lakka can also be configured to use ROMs that are served from a NAS for users who are comfortable working in a Linux shell environment.

Filesystem layout

The editable portions of the Lakka system can be found in the following folders. Note that these the only folders which are made accessible via SAMBA – accessing other areas of the filesystem requires a different approach.

roms - ROMs, films, music, and other content
savefiles
savestates - ‘quicksave’ states, as opposed to savefiles
screenshots
shaders - to override shaders
system - to store BIOSes
update - copy update files here to update Lakka
playlists - to access the playlists
joypad - joypad autoconfiguration profiles which are specific to your Lakka system
thumbnails - the place where game thumbnails are stored

Transferring files via a network connection

File transfer via Samba

Samba is a service that you can enable in Settings->Services which allows other computers on the local network to transfer files to Lakka via the CIFS/SMB protocol. Only the most important folders are accessible via Samba.

Windows, OS X, and most Linux distributions should be able to navigate directly to Lakka’s Samba share by entering lakka into their file browser. If you cannot reach the Lakka system by name, it may be possible to reach it by IP. Once you have determined Lakka’s IP, enter that address in the file browser as with the Lakka name earlier, such as FULL.IP.ADDRESS.HERE.

File transfer via SCP

This method requires that SSH be enabled in Lakka, but it is faster than SAMBA. It will also require that you have and be familiar with operating SCP-enabled file transfer software or an SSH client capable of managing SCP file transfers.

You may be able to connect to Lakka via the name “lakka” in your SCP client. If not, you will need to find the IP of your Lakka box.The credentials for SCP are the same as for SSH: username root and password root.

SCP on Linux and Mac OS X hosts

In a terminal, copy the files over network using the scp command:

SCP on Windows hosts

Download the free software FileZilla or WinSCP, and connect to Lakka using the SCP protocol (port 22). They will expose the directories of Lakka, you can transfer files by dragging and dropping.

Direct drive access

This method consists of mounting the SD card, flash drive, or hard drive where Lakka is installed on a host workstation running Windows, Linux, or OS X. It is not convenient if you have installed Lakka on a device with internal storage, since you would have to connect the drive to another PC. But it works well for ARM boards, where the storage media is an SD card most of the time.

Direct drive access on a Linux host

If you’re on Linux,

Install Lakka On Partition