Coin and start buttons

[Lowskiii]

Hello there fellow retro enthusiasts!

I am making an arcade and was thinking about the buttons layout and have a couple questions before I start.

So the first thing im wondering is wether I could use 1 coin button for both players and just connect the button to both the controllers. I am not sure if this would cause problems if you wanna play a single player game and you get coins for both players.

The second thing is that I would also prefer only one start button, so far I was playing with a controller and the only moments I needed the start button functionality was to open the menu of the emulator itself. I however never played 2 player games before and I would guess you need both players start button to make that work properly.

Then I want to use buttons to open the GMenu and exiting the game. I assume I need to manually edit this in the '/opt/retropie/configs/all/retroarch/autoconfig' file because when configuring a controller it only allows you to set a hotkey which I don't wanna use for the arcade buttons. So the question is do I need to manually edit this in the generated file or is there another way?

Thank you in advance!

[dankcushions]

@lowskiii said in Coin and start buttons:

Hello there fellow retro enthusiasts!

I am making an arcade and was thinking about the buttons layout and have a couple questions before I start.

So the first thing im wondering is wether I could use 1 coin button for both players and just connect the button to both the controllers. I am not sure if this would cause problems if you wanna play a single player game and you get coins for both players.

i'm not sure if this works from a circuitry point of view, so i'll leave this to those familiar with wired buttons.

The second thing is that I would also prefer only one start button, so far I was playing with a controller and the only moments I needed the start button functionality was to open the menu of the emulator itself. I however never played 2 player games before and I would guess you need both players start button to make that work properly.

typically if you press player 2 start in an arcade game, it will get you into 2 player mode, which is almost certainly not what you want to do. paired with your dual-insert coin button, it would effectively mean you could never play a fighting game in single player mode, for example.

Then I want to use buttons to open the GMenu and exiting the game. I assume I need to manually edit this in the '/opt/retropie/configs/all/retroarch/autoconfig' file because when configuring a controller it only allows you to set a hotkey which I don't wanna use for the arcade buttons. So the question is do I need to manually edit this in the generated file or is there another way?

yes you need to manually edit. if you don't set a hotkey when configuring it will default to your select button, so you need to remove it from the autoconfig/set it to nul.

[Lowskiii]

@dankcushions Alright thank you already! I do know it's possible to wire it like that but im more worried to how some games will respond to it when trying to play solo. I guess I will keep it simple for my first build and just use 2 separate ones.