We didn’t released a new version of Lakka for more than than 6 month now. The latest stable version was starting to show its age: no graphical menu, no RPi B+ support, etc. As the userbase increased, the new users started using our nightly builds more and more, and the release got completely abandoned.
That’s why we decided to release Lakka today. Even if we’re not totally satisfied with the current result - the menu is not as fast and not as configurable as we’d wish - it is still far better than the old release of may 2014.
So, I updated the website with the new links for RPi, Generic and Hummingboard/Cubox-i, and also added experimental support for Banana Pi, Cubieboard 2 and Cubietruck. We’ve been testing Lakka on a daily basis for all these platforms, and get comments from users on IRC, it’s pretty stable. You can browse the menu and play your games as expected. There are still some rough edges of course, like, not all of the settings are accessible, some common joypads are still unsupported, the rom filtering can still be improved, and some cores don’t work as well as we expect. If you want to submit a new bug, please check that it is not a known bug before posting.
Now let’s talk about the next developments in Lakka.
Our current menu code (lakka.c in RetroArch) is going to be replaced by xmb.c. This XMB menu driver had been in development for months, it’s becoming usable and will bring the following improvements:
You can expect XMB to be stable in the next two month.
We got a nice Odroid-c1 Board. It’s our new toy and we are actively porting Lakka to it. We hope to release it soon. For now we’re stuck on some u-boot packaging bugs, but Floreal is taking care of it. If you want to help us, join #lakkatv on freenode.
It’s not a secret that we’re getting closer to the libretro/RetroArch development team. Lakka can be resumed as RetroArch on OpenELEC with a nice theme, and all our code is mainlined in RetroArch as soon as possible. Their team had expressed the wish to develop a distro for their technologies, so it was a natural decision that Lakka will become this distro.
For now, it changes nothing for the end user and now the future of the project will be shinning. The libretro team is full of skilled people that will help us to make Lakka better, cleaner, more optimized. We feel proud to get their official recognition for the work we’ve been doing on Lakka so far.
Twinaphex, the leader of libretro, wants to promote the libretro API on a larger scale. This API is the language between the cores (your emulators) and the frontend (in our case, RetroArch), but it can be used to develop far more than just emulators. Some game engines have been ported (Cave Story for example) and some standalone games use it. It’s the cleanest way to develop a portable application. By portable, I mean that it will work with a single code base on all the platforms supported by RetroArch: PSP, Xbox, PS3, Android, iOS, Mac OS, windows, Linux, etc.
So if you’re a game developer and want to target all those platform at once for your game, get in touch with us on #retroarch (webchat) on freenode.