System Select Is Always Wrong

mitu

It looks ok. What do you mean by 'selecting the wrong menu' ?

AlphaBetaPie

Will post video soon

AlphaBetaPie

~UPDATE~

OK, I did a little more experimenting, and narrowed one thing down (and discovered something else REALLY weird).

First, it seems related to my 8BitDo pad. At boot, my RetroPie defaults to my custom console screen order of NES in the center, with the Amiga being to my right, and the Retropie settings to my left (these are the three menus that come pre-loaded). If hit select on my wireless USB keyboard, everything it fine. It goes down one level into the NES game select screen (which is what it should do). But if I try this exact same thing with the game pad, it jumps one screen to the left AND down into the settings menu (without evening having to hit the button twice, I just ended up in settings by hitting select on the pad).

The second weird thing is, using the pad reset some of my settings in my retropiemenu.xml. I edited the X and Y values to move the icons over to the right, and now they are rest back to where they were before. Why in hell this pad is wreaking that kind of havoc in such weird places is beyond me. I assume if I made a copy of this and moved it somewhere, this won't happen?

Anyone ever have this sort of weirdness?

mitu

Hm, sounds like ghost inputs - does the gampad have a joystick ? You could 'un-configure' them in Emulationstation and see if the joystick is ignored.
For the other problem, I don't really understand what happens - it's only when using the 8bit do gamepad that the help menu is 'broken' ?

AlphaBetaPie

@mitu UPDATE:

OK, I have been able to confirm something. I had some other settings I wanted to test from a fresh build, so I formatted my SD card and re-flashed my RetroPie image so everything was completely fresh (and default). I only tweaked few necessary settings (like setting up my settings to use SSH and Wi-Fi, set the resolution, turned off overscan, etc). I then immediately connected the 8BitDo Sn30pro Bluetooth game path to the pie (wanted to have it connected early to eliminate any of the changes I had made way later on).

I can confirm it's the pad for some reason. Even on what is basically a complete default system, it still drills down and one menu over when I simply his the select key. Nothing about my pie's setup has been changed that would affect this (to the best of my knowledge).

So other than changing game pads, not sure what else I can do. Anyone ever report these kinds of problems with the pad? Unless there is something I'm missing on the Retropie side.

mitu

@AlphaBetaPie said in System Select Is Always Wrong:

Anyone ever report these kinds of problems with the pad? Unless there is something I'm missing on the Retropie side.

Not when using the Select button, but I've seen a few posts about ghost inputs from the joypads/d-pad, I don't recall if they were related to any particular model of gamepad.

Clyde

*rummages his bookmarks*

https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/8187/gamepads-making-involuntary-movements-in-emulation-station

At least one controller could be fixed by replacing some capacitors on its board. See here and here and here.

Apart from that, external bluetooth adapters fixed the issue for some people, including me.

mitu

Actually I was thinking more on the line with this issue - https://www.raphnet-tech.com/support/retropie/index.php. If it would have been persistent ghost issues, I assume @AlphaBetaPie would have noticed this during operation or gameplay, since it would appear randomly, not only on the first connect/activation.

Clyde

@mitu I never noticed the ghost inputs of my Wii U Pro clones in games, only in ES when it did something out of the blue by itself like scrolling through the games or changing the system. I guess the action in most arcade games may overlap any occasional short ghost input in the eyes of the player, or I mistook them for my own inability. So like me, @AlphaBetaPie may not have noticed them outside of ES. 🙈

I concur about the randomness we would have to expect in this case, though.

AlphaBetaPie

In my experience, this only happens once at first load. Once the gamepad is engaged, it does not do this any more. It's just the first button press of the "A button" that makes it go down and to the right/left of the wrong menu, instead of just straight down. Also, if I hit any other button first before I select (again, to engage it or "wake it up" I guess you could say), then it works fine and goes where it's supposed to go on first press. So weird...

AlphaBetaPie

Also...

I'm willing to try the separate bluetooth receiver idea mentioned above, as my local PC store has them for like $15. How would I set this up? I know it has a place in the menu to un-sync any attached bluetooth devices. I assume the new adapter is just plug and play. But how do I disabled the on-board bluetooth on the raspberry pie to ensure the new adapater is what the controller syncs to now?

mitu

@AlphaBetaPie said in System Select Is Always Wrong:

I assume the new adapter is just plug and play.

Should be.

But how do I disabled the on-board bluetooth on the raspberry pie to ensure the new adapater is what the controller syncs to now?

Just add a line to the config.txt file on the SD card with

dtoverlay=pi3-disable-bt

and this should disable the on-board bluetooth.

Clyde

@AlphaBetaPie My Mayflash wireless adapter has a sync button like the bluetooth gamepads do, too. To sync them, I have to press the button on the adapter first, and then the button on the gamepads. Done. They stay synced until I sync the gamepad to another host.

After that, I just have to wake up the gamepad by pressing one of its normal buttons while the adapter is plugged into a USB port, and it will connect within seconds.

The adapter itself works out of the box in Retropie.

KN4THX

@AlphaBetaPie Out of curiosity, is this happening on a 3B or a 3B+?

AlphaBetaPie

So I did try disabling it using the line of code, which did work. I picked up a ASUS plug n' play Bluetooth adapter, which also worked in connecting. But it still does the same thing. So that eliminates that. I have just switched back to a USB cable controller for now. I'm going to try some of the other models 8BitDo has. Maybe it's just this one that is weird.

Also, I think the board I'm using is the plus model.

Clyde

@AlphaBetaPie You can check your Raspi model with this command:

cat /proc/device-tree/model