Poor emulation quality on PC

Libretro Lakka
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#1

Hello, I have installed Lakka on a PC with an Intel Core i5 and 8GB RAM and an SSD. Everything seems to function well, loads ROMS no problem and starts them right up. My issue is with the emulation quality (SNES), it runs fast enough unless there are many moving objects on the screen but the graphics are very sharp and pixelated and the colors are very dull. From what I can find out since there is very little information available, even in the official documentation, this is a shader issue?

I have tried to load all of the available cores, although I’m not sure anything actually happens when I select them, and attempted to try different shaders but many of them cause the system to become unresponsive and none of them seem to work. I can’t find any available info on how to fix this or why it is happening.

I can install any Linux distro and SNES9x and it works flawlessly which really confuses me since that is what seems to be loading the ROMS in lakka. It really seems odd that my RPi 2 runs the games perfect with Retro Pie and my PC looks rather horrible. Does anyone know of a resource for finding the proper shaders, or am I missing something? Is there a build with sane defaults enabled similar to Retro Pie?

Any help is appreciated, this is really frustrating me lol.

#2

Can you post a screenshot? There shouldn’t be any shaders enabled by default. If you’re wanting the image to be more blurry/smooth, go to settings > video and set ‘bilinear filtering’ to ON and then close/reopen your game.

As for slowing down when there are many moving objects on the screen, it sounds like that’s when the emulated console is slowing down, rather than your host PC.

#3

I tried the bilinear filtering and it made everything extremely blurry. I’m not sure how to take a screenshot in lakka. It helps to know that there are no shaders on by default, I just installed snes9x-gtk on Arch Linux on the same PC (different SSD) and the default options play and look just like the console would. Best way I can describe the issue in lakka is everything has a very rigid border, sharp edges, black pixelated outlines and dull colors. I really love the interface and it makes everything very simple with the auto gamepad setup and categories, sure hope I can fix this somehow.

#4

Wow, I feel kind of dumb. I think I have a bad HDMI cable, these are odd issues to have resulted from it, but it is working great after changing it! Of course when I was moving back to my desk to try Snes9x on Linux I was using the HDMI cable already hooked up to my monitor :blush: Sorry to have wasted space on the forums, makes sense now why I couldn’t find an answer.

#5

@hunterk So here is a real question, when lakka resizes the free space on the drive it formats it to ext4. How in the world do I gain access to put ROMs there? I have mounted the drive in Linux and tried to chmod to 755 and chown to my user but still I cannot create or move anything there. Is this free space usable?

#6

@hunterk nevermind lol, I guess I need to let it boot up once after it extends that partition and then it adds folders including a ROMs folder. I was letting it resize the partition and trying to add things to it before booting it up again.

#7

sounds like it’s coming together. I’m glad the HDMI cable got you sorted out :slight_smile:

#8

@hunterk It’s all together now, what an awesome software distribution! That HDMI cable caused some very odd issues, but I noticed that it is a really old cable like maybe the original HDMI spec, maybe not compatible with my GPU. Everything is working great now, thinking about getting another box for my bedroom but need something more discreet than a PC. Do you, or anyone for that matter, have any experience with the MXQ box? I see it is supported with the stable build and they are only around $30, sounds like a perfect fit.