Newbie needs help with playing some NDS games in lakka

Libretro Lakka
#1

Hello! This is my first post here :smiley:

I am a newbie to lakkaā€™s interface and I am somewhat confused :-/

How do I play my Nintendo DS games in lakka?? Here is what I tried:

I created a NDS folder in the roms folder and copied my NDS Roms in it. I scanned the directory and waited for the scan to complete. Once it got completed, I loaded the Nintendo DS (DeSmuMe) core. And then I select start core but nothing happenā€¦ I donā€™t know why :frowning:

My Hardware:

  1. Laptop
  2. A 8GB USB with lakka
  3. A mouse and a keyboard (Yeah, no joystick unfortunately) Planning to use my USB as a portable lakka plug-n-play game station.

Can someone give me some instructions? I am very new to the interface and I often mixup ā€œzā€ & ā€œxā€ :stuck_out_tongue:

Thanks in Advance :slight_smile:

#2

If the games were picked up by the scan, you donā€™t need to load the core, just find the game you want to play in the playlist and start playing :slight_smile:

However, the main problem with your workflow is that ā€œstart coreā€ is a little misleading in that it only applies to a handful of cores that donā€™t load any content (2048, a few others). In general, you should: load core > browse for core > load content > browse for content > play!

#3

[QUOTE=hunterk;42050]If the games were picked up by the scan, you donā€™t need to load the core, just find the game you want to play in the playlist and start playing :slight_smile:

However, the main problem with your workflow is that ā€œstart coreā€ is a little misleading in that it only applies to a handful of cores that donā€™t load any content (2048, a few others). In general, you should: load core > browse for core > load content > browse for content > play![/QUOTE]

Oh, I will try and report back :slight_smile:

#4

Yup, successfully booted my rom! :smiley: I donā€™t know how to create those play list thingies but what I did is ā€œAdd new contentā€ and ā€œLoad new contentā€ and it worked!.. Only with a catch sadly :frowning:

I donā€™t know if it is a emulation bug or lakka bug, but here it is:

The ROM which I was trying to boot was Pokemon Black. I can only see the"The Pokemon Company" intro scene and nothing in the touch display areaā€¦ After the intro scene, I cannot see anything but I can hear the sound effects. So far, its the only ROM which I have been able to test.

More tests coming soon.

btw, How do I access the configuration of DeSmuMe?

#5

Hmm. Dunno whatā€™s up with your ROM. Other people have reported playing Pokemon Black without any major issues, so maybe a bad dumpā€¦?

To access Desmumeā€™s core options, load up some content and then go back into the menu. You should see some options to save/load states and a few other things, among which you should see ā€˜options.ā€™ This refers to the coreā€™s own options for things like screen separation, etc. I donā€™t think this core has a ton of options, though.

#6

I tested the ROM, It worked fine in DraSticā€¦

I test some other ROMs, they work well enough, Only 2 remarkable issues so far:

  1. The video output is kinda strangeā€¦ I see more pixels than smooth things, any workarounds?
  2. The audio sometimes gets choppy, creaky etc.

Gonna test other Systems today, I got some GBA ROMs too :slight_smile:

#7

I tried some GBA, N64 and NES ROMs and they ran perrrrrfectly! :smiley:

Very Impressed! :smiley:

#8

Ok, something happen todayā€¦ I was playing some retro games on my dadā€™s PC in his office using my plugā€™nā€™play lakka stick and a Power Outage happenā€¦ Everything went poof, no electricity and the Desktop Computer went kaput. The next day I saw that the file system in my plugā€™nā€™play lakka stick has been corrupted! I let it do its auto repairā€¦ Only to discover that is literally reset things :frowning:

I loaded my stick again and played some games on my uncleā€™s laptopā€¦ I came home and tried to play Pokemon Black and it worked! I donā€™t know whyā€¦

I also discovered something amazing called ā€œshadersā€, they do shady things to my video output :stuck_out_tongue: j/k, they actually solve the problem of me seeing more pixels than normalā€¦ I recommend the bilinear shader :smiley:

Still no solution for Audio :frowning:

I have a question, I donā€™t see a option for ā€œAuto-Frame Skip Minimizationā€ in the DeSmuME core, is it enabled by default?

#9

RetroArch doesnā€™t generally do any frameskipping (the only exception I know of is if you use a too-heavy shader with threaded video enabled).

#10

I am using the DeSmuME core, it has an option for frameskippingā€¦