Lakka supports Raspberry Pi 3 and I wanted to see if it was indeed powerfull enough to run SNES and N64 emulation.

I flashed a Microsd with the latest Lakka image and tested the setup using my 42” Panasonic Plasma. First impressions were very bad, Super Mario World was choppy and the sound was glitchy.

Changing resolution of retro-arch from 1920x1080 to 1280x720 helped a bit, but still the performance was not acceptable. I tried with vsync off and on, but the performance still seemed bad.

After tweaking a bit, I noticed that the FPS was locked at 50 when inside the menu. It seemed my TV was running 50Hz and not 60Hz. The Super Mario World rom was the NTSC version, i.e. 59.99Hz version, which ofcourse meant that 50Hz would feel bad.

I connected with SSH and using tvservice to see what my output was. Indeed, 1920x1080x50hz was my output!! What the hell…

Luckily, this can be changed within the config.txt file residing in /flash. (Remember to remount flash with write permissions since it is readonly by default)

Adding the following lines to config.txt fixed my issue:

hdmi_drive=2 hdmi_group=1 hdmi_mode=16

the lines above configures the output to be HDMI with audio with a specific mode. Mode defines the resolution and refresh-rate, e.g. mode 16 is 1920x1080x60hz while mode 31 is 1920x1080x50hz. Mode 31 was selected by default in my setup apparently.

After a reboot, everything was smooth as silk.

Lakka supports TurboGrafx/PCEngine emulation out of the box atleast for ROMs, but the CD roms (cue/bin) requires that one find the correct bios: syscard3.bin and uploads this into the system directory on the Lakka box. No issues with this if one can find the correct syscard3.bin file.

However, I still struggled getting PCE CD emulation to work since Retroarch crashed whenever I tried to load Castlevania: Rondo of Blood.

It took me some time to figure out what the problem was and no resources online was helpful. I finally pinpointed the issue to the .cue file of the release. Even though the .cue file was 100% correct, i.e. all .wav and .bin files were correctly referenced by the cue file with no apparent pathing issues, I had to change the cue file manually to get it to work:

1. I removed all spaces from the filenames, e.g. “rondo of blood(j).bin” -> “rondoofblood(j).bin”.
2. I removed all *special characters*, e.g. “rondoofblood(j).bin” -> “rondoofblood.bin”.
3. I changed all Tracks to be of BINARY Type, i.e. WAVE -> BINARY.

I believe step 3 was what did the trick for me. Example of an WAVE entry converted to BINARY:

Before:

FILE Track01.wav WAVE TRACK 01 AUDIO INDEX 01 00:00:00

After:

FILE Track01.wav BINARY TRACK 01 AUDIO INDEX 01 00:00:00

Not sure why this works, but it does atleast on the latest Lakka x86 build.

After booting the game, no sound would play of any kind. I wrongly believe this to be due to my hack above, but no, this was simply because the emulator defaults to 0% music, ambient and effects volume, but why?!?!

Increasing the volume to 100% fixed the issue.

BTW - Rondo of Blood for PCE is better than Castlavania X for the SNES even though they share alot of gameplay elements…

Just my two cents.