Ok, so what happened was..... with the SNES and NES roms I had left them in their zip folders. And the emulators seem to handle that just fine. But apparently the Atari and the Apple2 emulators don't recognize the zip folders. Yes, I know that's a beginner mistake, but my previous knowledge is zero.....so...... And now I know what it means on the github documentation that the accepted extensions like .ATR etc are specific for the destination folder. I am so new at this I didn't even know what to look for. But I'm reliving the 80's like a boss now.

Thanks again for your help, y'all fixed it!

ok, got a small problem, did all that and added:
p1control A=J0B0,B=J0B1,C=J0B2,D=J0B3,START=J0B6,COIN=J0B10,UP=J0a1,DOWN=J0a1,LEFT=J0A0,RIGHT=J0A0,MENU=J0B7

to the gngeorc file and the controller works BUT:
coin is the center big xbox button and start is the left trigger.

that seems weird
does anyone know the code for the start and select buttons on an xbox 360 controller or how to find out?
cheers

SOLVED - rename dc_bios.bin to dc_boot.bin its ok!

@Gate I wonder if my advice is just too far removed from your configuration. I don't have any controllers--only a keyboard interface (IPAC-4). All of my controls are wired directly to the keyboard interface, so none of the joypads apply for me.

I am surprised, however, that you can't get the MAME GUI to appear with the TAB key on a keyboard. It can be very handy to see inside the emulator what MAME thinks you have mapped to a given control. I wish I had more advice to troubleshoot.

the genesis folder was just a symlink to the megadrive folder. You can't create a new genesis folder but you can recreate the link by reinstalling lr-picodrive (or any other megadrive emulator) from retropie-setup menu 5.

Or just use the megadrive folder.

@Jonathan I've only got 8 GB left on my 128GB thumbdrive..... :)

Yup... guys... I'm the moron. I uploaded 7zip files instead of zip files. I'm extremely sorry and usually i hate people like myself... now i hate myself. I love you guys and i'll donate again before the day is up!

@BuZz Reporting on success building Retropie on Lubuntu 16.04:

install from binaries does not exist, had to compile everything from source some emulators are optimised for ARM architectures (or so packages say) - not sure how they're going to work over time many emulators and ports failed to compile on first attempt; after 3 attempts, only a Doom port is still holding out (everything else reports OK, but haven't tested yet) Mupen64plus was waaaaay too fast to be playable (tested on Mario Kart). Removed and re-installed from apt-get and everything seems to be OK (may be solution for other ARM-optimized packages)

Apart from that everything seems to be working fine :D thanks!!

Wish i saw this earlier but yeah downgrade to 1.68. I had the same issue with 1.69. Once you're on 1.68 and map the buttons through emulationstation, retroarch should pick up those controls.

@theroamer said in 8bitdo FC30 pro controller mapping getting messed up in emulators:

What controller firmware are you using? I had that problem with my NES30 Pro on 1.69, downgrading to 1.68 and re-pairing fixed it.

@theroamer not trying to hijack this thread but have you got your NES30 Pro working with kodi yet? it seems i can't get the d-pad/analog to work correctly.

Ok got it to recognize my cono roller, by modifying the retroarch.cfg, but not I'm always forced to be player 2, andon't thus have no hot keys. Ideas?

Good to hear.

@RetroResolution
After changing the kernel.
The problem "CCurlFile::FillBuffer - Failed: Could not connect to server (7)" left.
And another good thing, the bletooth frezers too.
Source: https://github.com/raspberrypi/linux/issues/1360#issuecomment-218519761