Play with Me!

After all the preparatory work has been completed, you can integrate the desired games, known as ROMs, into the system by transferring them to the roms/ directory of the SD card. (Please see the "Gray Area" box.) If you emulate several different gaming consoles, you should create a separate subdirectory for each console to store the ZIP archives or ISO images.

To activate the desired console, select the Load Core option from the main menu. In addition to hardware emulators for pure consoles, you will find DOSBox for emulating a DOS system. Next, load the desired game by choosing Load Content | Start Directory | Load Archive.

The menu disappears and the game screen appears. Use the controller to navigate through the game. Lakka automatically saves scores and configurations, allowing you to resume interrupted games from the History menu at your old score (Figure 3).

Figure 3: The History menu allows you to reload scores after a break.

Lakka also makes it possible to retrieve ROMs from the network by clicking Netplay in the main menu. In a clear-cut dialog, you can define whether to use the Rasp Pi as a host or a client.

Conclusions

Lakka on the Raspberry Pi offers hours of gaming fun without tying the user to a specific console model. The game pace was positive in the test on the RPi3.

However, some DOS games ran so fast they could not be played in DOS emulation. In other games, the player immediately lost track of the game in quickly changing complex scenarios. You shouldn't use very old games on high-resolution monitors, because scaling the content creates ugly block effects.

Lakka offers many configuration options, decent hardware support, and easy-to-use menus. The few weaknesses still to be found under the hood are probably a result of the rapid on-going development of the software and are likely to disappear in future releases.