Suggestion: Easier Transfer of Roms from USB to Lakka system

Libretro Lakka
#1

Hi everyone! First of all, let me just say that Lakka is amazing. A bit tedious to setup if you’re a noob (like me) but otherwise, I was able to revive one of the old laptops lying around our house with this (I installed Lakka into the laptop’s internal hard drive) and it’s great!

Anyway, here’s my problem. (Disclaimer: I searched the forums and the Lakka docs for this and cannot find a solution.)

I live in the Philippines (born and raised) and the internet situation here is horrendous (like country-average-speed-of-3 Mbps horrendous), which makes transfer of roms over network very slow. To put in perspective, I have to wait for 30 mins to one hour to transfer 1Gb worth of roms to my Lakka laptop.

That said, I actually tried removing my laptop’s internal hard drive and accessing the file system (following this) in which I transferred the roms. After placing the hard drive back in the laptop and booting it up, I can’t find the roms I placed even when I checked through Samba! So there, I had no choice but to transfer roms over our slow network.

Now, if it’s not much, I hope there would be a way to transfer roms from USB to my Lakka laptop. As much as possible, I want to utilize my laptop’s portability by not hooking up a USB just to play the games from there (which will also render the laptop’s hard drive space useless).

So, yeah, I really hope for an easier way. If there’s none, it’s okay and it won’t stop me from using Lakka. But if there is, then great!

1 Like
#2

Your internet situation will only effect you downloading roms from the internet but it doesn’t effect your internal transfer speed from your local workstation to lakka. Might be as simple as having your workstation and Lakka both wired or getting a new wifi router for your house.

Lakka runs on LibreElec so you will have to research how to mount the usb flash drive and copy files in between but it isn’t any different then most Linux distros.

#3

Might be an obvious suggestion, but did you scan for the new ROMs after adding them?

As Internetfloozy has stated, your internet speed isn’t the problem - it’s your local wireless network that is slow, or the devices connecting to it such as your laptop might simply have a slow network card. You should find that the transfers are way faster if you connect your devices via an Ethernet cable.

#4

I did scan, it’s what I usually do after adding new ROMs over network.

Speaking of which, you guys are probably right. My laptop’s pretty old so I guess it really does have a slow network card. I’ll try hooking up my laptop to the modem although I can’t say the same for my desktop in my room since the modem’s downstairs.

#5

I was going to say, "Uh, why don’t you use the USB drive AS the source of your ROMs/ISOs instead of porting them to the drive? :confused: " but hey, if it’s a much older laptop, I get it, slower port. One of my favorite features about Lakka is the fact that I could use the USB ports as sources for the ROMs/ISOs right away without much configuring on their part (just make sure their NTFS/FAT32). I have a 256 GB USB 3.0 flash drive attached to my XU4 unit where my ROMs/ISOs are stored.

#6

I agree, running ROMs and ISOs off a USB flash and/or a hard drive is a great feature of Lakka. That said, this is more of utilizing the space of my laptop that I opted against using a USB flash drive.

Anyway, I somehow got a solution without using a network: I transfered my ROMs/ISOs from my PC to an external hard drive, ran a live version of a Linux distro (doesn’t matter which), and then transfer those ROMs/ISOs to my laptop’s internal drive. Quite “messy,” but at least it did the job. :grin:

#7

ssh is pretty smooth aswell.