TurboGrafx-16/PCEngine CD Emulation

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.