so it turns out doing relative file paths for the symlink worked a treat, but i was still having issues with config.txt
I managed to track it down though. Mounting the boot partition, changing the config, then unmounting wasn't actually working!! if i re-mounted again straight away, it would be back to the original files.

I found a fix though, you have to mount the loop device with a sync flag, this stops it caching the changes and makes it work as expected :)

thanks again for your help @mitu :)

@bubbypop666 Adafruit carries them.

@Mikey123 So.., right now do you still need help or have you figured out how the core remapping works ?

I think I've found the issue. There are two connections on the button as well as ground. I've switched few of the buttons over to the second connection and they all now function as expected. The ones I haven't changed still result in continuous firing.

I'll continue to rewire and report back if the results are good.

@mitu yup it seemed to remember the controller when it was the only one plugged in. What I’ve noticed is that the controller is switching to and from JS0 to JS1. I just configured it with the keyboard and it’s JS0 again. I’m wondering if having multiple controllers plugged in at one time might be the issue. I’ll try running Drastic and using just the lone PS4 controller and hopefully it works out!

Thanks again!

@Vikeyev Did you modify the /etc/rc.local startup script ? Remove or comment anything there if you did and see if that fixes your init problem.

@AndersHP it's only slower if the shader causes you to lose frames, but i would guess that the 10% of games that you're losing frames with the crt-pi shader now, it will be less than 10% with the zfast-crt shader.. maybe 0% :)

Seems like the VLC update from Raspbian broke something. Your problem seems similar to a recently reported issue here. I'm going to ask the same things to track things down

add the info requested in https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/3/read-this-first run the ffmpeg command to identify which video codec/format is the video file that doesn't work.

Can you upload on of the video files with the problem somewhere (Dropbox/Google Drive/etc.) to take a look at it ?

@SpudsMcToole

If you are not satisfied with the performance, try to switch the 'Synchronisation method' to 'Flexible'. With the 'Exact' method I got only 90% and choppy sound...
Under the 'Video settings' / ' Size settings' disable 'Double size/Double scan/Full screen options' and set the 'Custom resolution' to 384x272, SDL2 will do its job.

Sorry for my poor english. ;)

Turns out the only gamelist that was created was in ~/RetroPie/roms/retropie/gamelist.xml , (there was only this single one on my whole disk, and I did search for hidden files, too).
But in the retropie_setup.sh -> tools -> scraper options, I had disabled (or forgotten to enable) that the .xmls be put in their respective rom directories.
So I deleted the single gamelist and image folder (that contained metadata for >10 systems), scraped again, since I really couldn't be bothered with manually sorting metadata for >4k Roms into different folders, and this time everything was saved to the right locations!
Thank you very much for providing me with the correct locations, the problem is solved now and the thread can be closed.

@zmb187 Please add more information about your system as asked in https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/3/read-this-first.

What controller types ? Are you supplying enough power to the PI with a proper power source ?

@dml1783 Please add the info requested in https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/3/read-this-first to your topic.
What is the source of the video snaps ? Did you use a scraper to download them or added them yourself ?
Run from a command line

ffmpeg -i <path_to_video_file_with_errors>

and paste here the output to see what codec/video format is the video file.

i updated and my snaps turned blue... omxplayer is not an option for me because it forces the video to be infront of the background...

Ok thank you for that.
I just wasn't sure if the same bug was in stretch and that the documentation had not been updated, as the documentation also stated that bug before retropie moved to stretch in april.
Thanks

@mitu thank you so much for sending that over. I took a look at that at the time but ran into a couple of issues that would benefit from others' inputs as the changes to make it work don't seem to be trivial and will likely imply some changes in other areas of the code, so I'd rather not do that without others' perspective.

@jdrassa this is the issue that prompted our chat a while back, for context. I may take this on later or at least add comments to the issue that was just created so that we can discuss things there.

Thanks all.

@mitu never knew that, hmmmmmmmm. Thanks for the heads up

you're right. I was looking in the wrong partition. thank you very much