Lately SBC boards are becoming fashionable, this is because together with a version of Gnu / Linux, we can get a personal computer for little money, but only that? No, we can get more things, like servers, media centers and even retro consoles. The latter is attracting a lot of attention, thanks among other things to the Lakka project, a project that not only takes the base of Gnu / Linux but also modifies it based on the OpenElec project to such an extent that it seems that we have the interface of the PlayStation 3.
Lakka takes ArchLinux as a base and in addition to including this distribution and the interface mentioned above, includes several emulators and several free roms by default so that once installed we just start playing.
The good thing about Lakka when it comes to using a more general distribution is that Lakka's team of developers takes free hardware as a base, in such a way that the idea is that with a simple SBC board such as Raspberry Pi or Banana Pi you can create a retro console like old super nintendo.
Lakka installation on an SBC board
Lakka installation is very simple and easy. For this we will only need to download the distribution, a sd or microsd card, this will depend on the sbc board that we use and a computer with Gnu / Linux.
Once we have all this, we go to Lakka's official website and we select the image to download according to the hardware device that we have and the operating system that we will use to record it. Once downloaded, we insert the sd card into our computer and save the image according to the default utility or through the terminal (for advanced users I recommend this option). If we use the terminal we will write the following:
sudo dd if = Lakka -. * Img of = / dev / sdX
In x of SD we write the number that our computer gives to the sd card. Once the sd card is recorded, we just have to insert it into the SBC board and turn it on, after a few minutes, the board will be ready to use as a retro console.
How to install new or own roms
Once we have Lakka installed on the sd card, we will only have to save the roms in the folder created for this purpose. To do this, we only have to connect through the Ethernet port (currently Lakka does not work very well with Wi-Fi networks) and copy the roms we want to the roms folder. Another easier and safer way, without having to have an Ethernet connection at hand, is to take the sd card and insert it into a pc, from the pc we navigate and look for the roms folder inside the card. There we copy the roms that we want to test.
Conclusion
If we take into account the price of a board like Raspberry Pi and the costs of Lakka, we can say that it is currently one of the best entertainment options that exist, not because of its power, but because of its entertainment / price ratio, although of course it is always we can resort to installing on our pc an emulator with the roms we want Which version do you keep?
I think Lakka is a great idea to rescue those old PCs and give them a new use. A wonderful idea that does not affect our pocket if retro games are our favorite hobby.