If you have an old PC lying around your house collecting dust and you don’t what to do with it then turning it into an arcade machine to play classic games and relive your childhood would be a great idea.
You can easily play classic console games on PC’s using various emulators but what if you really wanna get the feel and don’t wanna be hunched over all the time, rather being on your favorite couch in the living room laid back and able to play with just a controller not worrying about using a keyboard to exit out of anything at all, well you have come to the right place as we will guide you on how to turn your old PC into a classic console:
• Lakka Emulator:
We are going to use Installed Lakka Emulator which will turn your old PC into an amazing retro gaming machine. Lakka is a Retro Arch based emulator project which is well known for performing as a multi-system emulator, means it can run multiple console games all in one package.
• What You Need:
In order to start up the installation process you will be needing following things:
* A PC for downloading Lakka and creating a USB drive installer.
* A USB stick of at least 1 Gigabyte, make sure to back up all the important files on the USB as you will be formatting it.
* An Ethernet cable to transfer game ROMs.
* A XBOX 360, XBOX One, PS3, PS4 or any other controller.
• Installation Process:
* First you will be needing to download the LAKKA operating system from their website: www.lakka.tv
* Once the site completely loads up you will be presented with a “Get Lakka” button, pressing the button will load up another page.
* Here you will again see the “Get Lakka” button, press the button and it will load up another page.
* From Here select your operating system, then select PC and then select the 32 or 64 bit version depending upon your hardware.
* This will download a zip file on to your computer.
* Extract the .zip file and you will get a .img file.
* Burn the .img file to your USB drive using software like PowerISO or Etcher.io
* Now you have successfully created a USB drive Installer.
* Next you will need to plug this USB stick on to your old PC.
* Once the PC starts up, make sure you hit the F12 button or any other function key depending upon the brand of PC you have in order to get into the boot menu.
* Once you’re in the boot menu, select boot from USB flash drive.
* You will now see a menu, from this menu select run installer.
* Another menu should pop up, here select quick Install of Lakka.
* Then hit YES on all the prompts and it should install rather quickly.
* Once that is done, select reboot and unplug the USB drive.
* Wait a couple minutes and it should boot up into the Lakka main menu.
* Now you can connect your game controller and wait for Lakka to recognize it.
* Once it recognizes the controller reboot Lakka from the Main menu.
* Now it’s time to load our game ROMs and our system files.
* There are a couple of ways you can load game ROMs but for we are gonna focus on the simplest way to load the ROM.
* You can load up ROMs using network support meaning that you can add your ROMs to Lakka using another computer attached to your network.
* To do this, you will need to go back to your main computer and under network Lakka should appear as a network location.
* Click on it and you will see a bunch of folders, under the ROMs folder, make folder according to what you want to what you wanna add to Lakka.
* A thing to keep in mind is that some consoles require BIOS in order to boot. The most popular of these is the PlayStation.
* So in order to run PlayStation games look for these specific files around the net.
* Once you find the BIOS file, you will need to copy those files into the system folder.
* Now back to Lakka, reboot it and scan the directory for all the folder from an option present in the menu.
* Now the game icons should appear in the menu and you can start playing and enjoying.
Lakka is a great Emulator for this purpose as it runs all the retro games smoothly, its main menu and layout looks like a modern console menu. There are various settings option in the menu that you can look around and set according to your requirements. You can change wallpaper as well as game thumbnails from the settings menu. WiFi connectivity is also available and you can download various Lakka themes online.
Hopefully, this guide helped you in figuring out what to do with that old computer you have lying around and at least you can use it to live out your childhood once again.