Enabling in-game Quick Menu

neek

I've figured out that from the arcade buttons I can do select+Up to get in and out of the menus. I still don't understand why I can't do it from my keyboard. I also have a few extra buttons on my build that I'd like to use (4 total) so any guidance about button mapping would still be welcome. thank you!

saccublenda

@neek You can map all the buttons and hotkeys (including keyboard keys) from the retroarch menu.

neek

@saccublenda Thanks. Yes now that I can get the quick menu working I can change some things, but others require what appears to be manual edits. I'm mostly asking if anyone has any detail beyond the Controller sub-pages of the RetroPie docs that describes how the various layers of configs override one another.

For example:

f I have a game-specific config, does the system-level config load and then get overridden on some parameters by the game-specific one? Or is the game-specific one loaded instead of the system one?
I tried remapping my keyboard hotkey to be "rshift" but now I notice that my Xbox360 controllers have the ability to bring up the Quick Menu, but maybe that was previously broken. Or did my remapping for one device reset it for others?
My Xbox360 controllers also have no key mapped to start a game, but the docs page makes me think it should be pretty automatic
And finally, I'm still trying to figure out how to map the extra keys on my control panel to do what I want. Am I able to make a single button map to the Quick Menu command?

DavidDraper

There are two parts.

You need to have a "hotkey" button and a "menu" button.

The hotkey button (usually "select") is like a shift key; when you press it and other buttons, you get different functions.

Usually, the "menu" button is X.

Here are the relavant lines from one of my .cfg's files:

input_select_btn = "8"
#select is mapped to input 8 on the controller

input_enable_hotkey_btn = "8"
#select (input 8) is the hotkey button; when you push select and other butts, something special happens.

input_x_btn = "0"
#x button is mapped to input 0 on the controller

input_menu_toggle_btn = "0"
#x button (0 input on the controller) is the menu button.

Other hotkey buttons include save current game state, load saved game state, advance save slot number, decrease save slot number, and reset game. Not all cores support the save settings.

Good luck!

David

neek

@DavidDraper Yep thanks I saw that, but in the case of my last bullet, I was hoping there'd be a way to map a button directly to Quick Menu, (or, for that matter, any of the other hotkey-driven functions). Seems like there is not, but doing something like e.g.: input_quick_menu_btn="8"
or similar would be a shortcut for what's normally hotkey+X.

This system is one of those which just has a bit of a learning curve to understand how it's all put together, and I get that I'm just not over that curve yet. :-)

DavidDraper

Yeah- I saw the last bullet, but I don't know a way to get one key to be both the hotkey and a the menu key at the same time. Sorry. :-/

Dave

mitu

Once you define a hotkey button/key, you can't activate a hotkey action without it. It needs the 2 keys (hotkey enable + hotkey function) to work, so 1 key for quick menu (the toggle_menu hotkey) won't work.

neek

@mitu this was the magic I was looking for, for that part of my problem. Thank you!!

Just so I can understand the system design, is the idea that the (non-analog) inputs are mapped to keyboard keys, and then all the other controllers get mapped to the keyboard? Or do I need to find mappings for each action (e.g. toggle_menu) for each input type? I have an arcade setup + keyboard + xbox360 controllers.

mitu

Each controller gets its own configuration file in \\retropie\configs\all\retroarch-joypads, where the mapping is saved based on your choices during the input configuration. RetroPie automatically adds some hotkey actions (Load/Save/Exit/Menu/etc.) to the configuration - see https://retropie.org.uk/docs/First-Installation/#hotkey.

There's no intermediary mapping to keyboard keys, RetroArch's abstraction for input is a RetroPad, not a keyboard.

neek

Thank you. Again all of your guidance is helpful but I'm still missing something..

Is there a hierarchy of how these files load? It looks like perhaps the core file is /opt/retropie/configs/all/retroarch.cfg" but then that file is copied to each emulator's directory in /opt/retropie/configs the first time a game launches that emulator? At runtime do both of those files get read in? If so, in what order? And then are the configs from retroarch-joysticks/ overlaid on top of those? I see that ~/.config/retroarch/retroarch.cfg is just a symlink back to the one in /opt

I've commented out the settings for the hotkey, as far as I can tell, but still the system is behaving as it did before my changes, so I'm obviously missing something. I can't find any clear documentation on all of this, though I guess I can start reading through the mounds of source code if needed..

thanks!

mitu

@neek said in Enabling in-game Quick Menu:

Is there a hierarchy of how these files load?

Yes, sort of - see https://retropie.org.uk/docs/RetroArch-Configuration/#config-hierarchy

It looks like perhaps the core file is /opt/retropie/configs/all/retroarch.cfg" but then that file is copied to each emulator's directory in /opt/retropie/configs the first time a game launches that emulator? At runtime do both of those files get read in?

See the above link. Only 1 file is loaded, the one from the system's configuration folder. The main file (from configs/all) is loaded via the #include directive, present in the system's config file.

If so, in what order? And then are the configs from retroarch-joysticks/ overlaid on top of those? I see that ~/.config/retroarch/retroarch.cfg is just a symlink back to the one in /opt

No, only 1 retroarch.cfg file is loaded. The controllers' .cfg files are loaded separately, based on the name of the controller present when RetroArch starts - they're only used for the input configuration, not for general RetroArch configuration.

neek

@mitu Again thank you so much! I really appreciate your help.