I have an Acer so it’s too tricky to boot from an external media. I also want to use cores that are too heavy for the Pi3b. Is there another OS like Lakka that can fit my needs that I can run off of a VM (Virtual Box preferred).
Obvious answer is plain RetroArch on whatever OS you are using (presumably Windows or Linux).
Why run a VM?
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As said in question, Acer laptops are notorious for not allowing you to boot from an external drive, usb, etc. without much configuration that can easily wreck havoc on the BIOS or leave your computer in an unusable/vulnerable state. It was the way they were manufactured. Besides, my Dad said if I even touch those settings he will personally get rid of my computer (he uses it too).
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If you need to run in a VM, just install basically any Linux distro and then run RetroArch inside that.
First thing I thought of, but the Linux distros I find are too resource intensive. Can you suggest one to use with a VM spec of 4G RAM, 1core (of 2) intel proccessor 3.30GH, and reccommend HD size to allocate? I also have a NVIDIA Geforce.
that’s not going to be great for anything, but try something like Lubuntu.
You don’t need to boot any OS from USB or whatever. It’s just a program.
Are you not allowed to run a program on the installed OS? If I’m missing something, please explain.
Lakka doesn’t support dual boot. And since my Dad has work stuff on it he doesn’t want me tinkering in BIOS.
Then just install Retroarch in the OS, that is currently running on that said Acer laptop, or on your computer. It will run most probably better than when virtualized.
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LAKKA is only a minimalistic linux distro to run RetroArch.
If you have a computer with a OS (i presume windows) than you can download RetroArch from the retroarch.com site.
When you choose the 7z archive, you can extract the content in a folder on a partition you like.
No installation, no system manipulation required.
All necessary files can be found in this folder.
The only thing is to start the retroarch.exe, browse to your games an enjoy.
E:\some_folder\
└── retroarch\
└──retroarch.exe
(you have to download the needed cores before)
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Okay this is perfect!!!
Where is the best place for cores? Is there a zip containing many cores I can just dump into RetroArch somewhere?(I don’t like searching for these kinds of things one at a time.)
In RetroArch there is the online updater on the first tab.
Once you run retroarch.exe, everything can by downloaded from the menu
This includes the cores?
Please look a bit around on the retroarch site. You probably will find your answers there:
https://www.retroarch.com/?page=faq
https://www.retroarch.com/?page=cores
https://docs.libretro.com/
Lakka is running perfectly in a QEMU/KVM container by it self. i created a SMB share so lakka could fetch 250gb of roms. I allocated a 10gb vdisk and its only using 2gb. I will check again in a few days after its done collection its covers and such