Batocera better than lakka? Or are there other alternatives?

RetroArch
#1

Seems more and more people are using batocera. Is this better? Newer lakka Releases has some major issues for me, i reported at GitHub but the devs don’t care. For example Vulkan stopped working with lakka 6.x . The dev said: “use gl” and closed the issue as completed. Now i am looking for alternatives, because i don’t want to use lakka 5.0 /RA 1.17 for the rest of my life. :joy:

Has anyone tried batocera? Is it worth a shot? What are the downsides If there are any?

Is there a nice Community, like here?

Can i use my old wallpapers, Playlists, Thumbnails with it?

I wonder If there is a Linux-Retroarch distro wich mainly targets x64 Hardware?

#2

As an emudev, i have 2 issues with batocera :

  • sometimes they use weird patches to change the behavior of a core
  • overall, they are using very outdated cores, and you can’t update them

Because of this, i can’t provide support for batocera users.

That seems quite messed up.

I like retropie, you install it on top of a regular debian/ubuntu and it just acts as a helper to organize and update your emulators. You can basically do whatever you want, it might require some minimal interest/knowledge about linux though.

1 Like
#3

Batocera has many plus sides. They include support for standalone emulators and Retroarch cores… including overlay support for 4x3 standaplone emulators.

They have database and scripts to make running obscure MAME system easier.

The x86 port has Kodi integrated so there is no need to jump through hoops to get a decent HTPC up and running.

They have a strong Discord presence. I can’t say much about the strength of the community since Discord doesn’t breed the same king of community that a forum does, but my relationship with many of the Devs has been a great joy.

What @BarbuDreadMon said, although there are always downsides… you just need realistic, informed expectations.

I will say that Batocera has support for 40+ hardware platforms… it is my goto choice for PC HTPCs, Odroids, and Pi4s.

2 Likes
#4

Thank you guys.

to me lakka is great because i dont need to setup and install a whole sytem + RA . And it is more or less RA official/Standard, and its a clean system without bloat/desktop stuff. also that samba is setted up by default, makes it great when accessing setting and files with an 2nd PC without carrying about the network settings. it just works out of the box. All in all lakka was what i had dreamed of many years ago. But it seems getting more and more unstable, at least on my system with newer Versions (Hardware is otherwise “bulletproofed” with memtest86 and prime95).