@dankcushions I've managed to get it working now. Needed to unzip the file!

Now to move the roms over. ( God help me)

Thank you for your help!

Update

Yesterday I went ahead and FTP'ed the retroarch.cfg to this folder on the SD card:

\retropie\configs\from_retropie\configs\all\retroarch.cfg
-- Note to be honest I am at work and not in front of the RPi3 so I am guessing that was the path to the file.

I rebooted the Rpi3 and went down to the game-room to see what the controls now did. Well they worked! They all did something and that was great. No they are not all correctly mapped to the MAME/iPAC2's default settings. One example of an issue is that in MAME to exit MAME you traditionally do a P1 & P2. On this current button configuration I have to do a P2&P1. This will need to be changed in the config.

I also noticed that Player 1's buttons correspond to getting into and out of menus. I will need to disable those menus and the white dialog config box in the end.

Otherwise MAME setup is looking good!

One question is this can I create a retroarch.cfg file for just the MAME versions I am using and let the original mapping work for all other consoles? What I eventually want to do is to have matching USB joysticks on a hook on either side of the cab in case I want to hit some SMB3 or old school SNES game.

Thank you,
Battlecat

@DrMaxwell Thank you very much for your reply!

Here is a screenshot of how I had it setup.
Originally I set it up with a keyboard being connected to the Pi, however I have moved on to SSH.0_1473220343423_Capture.JPG

@zarrath I can't really give you a point by point description, but there is a guide on the RetroPie wiki that teaches you how to make themes. I should point you in the right direction at least.

https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki/Creating-Your-Own-EmulationStation-Theme

One simple thing I can tell you, if you just want to hide some text to stop it showing up, you can use <fontSize>0</fontSize>. This effectively tells ES to make that element have a font size of 0, so nothing can be seen. You use it like this:

<text name="md_description"> <fontSize>0</fontSize> </text>

This would stop the description from showing on the screen. If you wanted to move the existing elements, or change their size, you would need to play with <size> and <pos>.

Also keep in mind that you may have to make changes to each theme.xml within the system folders as well as changing carbon.xml, but that would depend on what you want to change.

@edmaul69 ok cool. Thanks mate.

I ended up just building it from scratch. I tried what you said. After one of the reboots it started saying my es_systems.cfg was messed up and had to fixed manually. I used the bak that was there and that did nothing. Its no big deal. Its always been an ongoing project

Please try this. It just links from /home/pi/retropie/roms to your USB drive /media/usb/roms

https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/2582/can-my-usb-device-have-data-on-it-already/5

Please create ROMS folder on USB, fill your ROMS according to your systems.

PSX games are located to /media/usb/roms/psx and so on....

PS: The systems are not deleted. On your first attempt you seem to miss the correct configuration and so RetroPie can not find any ROMs and so no EMU-system is displayed. There is really nothing "deleted".

The wiki should probably redirect people to use the menu option. It didn't even have the warning at one point - Sometimes there is out of date info there.

@dankcushions yeah those settings are a good start. For both tv's i have hooked my pi to use -5 -5 -25 -25

@BuZz @edmaul69

Hey guys - I finally got around to making this change it worked like a charm. I exited ES, then made the change from terminal, wrote the changes, and launched ES from terminal.

When I got back and ran my first ROM, the cursor was still there, but every ROM I launched subsequent to that opened and exited without the cursor. I thought that detail my be worth noting for future reference. I'm finally done configuring and learning about Retropie and on to enjoying it thoroughly.

Thank you for all the incredible work, documentation, and support!!!

@hannaman some ports require manual configuration. Most things are documented on the wiki - see https://github.com/retropie/retropie-setup/wiki/First-Installation for a fresh install.

I recommend doing that, as I have no idea what state you have bought the software in.

"Note for eBay: No copyright material is contained on this item. All software supplied is open source and free of copyright. " Yeah - sure!

Yep. Was a crappy Intenso sd card. Won't buy those again.
Works on a Sandisk.
Thanks.

@awsd12 try it and see!
(the answer is yes)