Controller working in menu but not in Game

joaoluiz

I am having the same issue on a fresh install of Retropie on a fresh install of Linux Mint 21 beta.

The gamepad works in EmulationStation, but once an emulator is launched, a Retroarch overlay pops up saying that the gamepad is not configured, and the gamepad does not respond. Once I press "Esc" and return to EmulationStation, the gamepad starts working again.

I tried different gamepads and many different retroarch emulator cores, and had the same issue. I also tried to uninstall and reinstall Retropie, and then wiped the entire hard drive and reinstalled the OS and Retropie, but the same issue occurred.

The gamepads I tried were:

Buffalo Classic USB Gamepad (looks like a SNES controller)
Retro-bit 8-button Sega Genesis controller

Both gamepads are wired (USB) controllers.

I have used Retropie with the Buffalo gamepad on other computers (a notebook with intel integrated graphics, a desktop with nvidia graphics card, and a Raspberry Pi), and never had this issue. But I think this is the first time I installed Retropie on this particular computer. This is also the first time I use Linux Mint 21. My previous installs of Retropie were on Linux Mint 20 and Raspbian. My guess is that this could be an OS issue or some sort of incompatibility with this PC.

I found this post where someone suggested changing the input_joypad_driver field in /opt/retropie/configs/all/retroarch.cfg from "on" to "sdl".

I checked my opt/retropie/configs/all/retroarch.cfg file and found this:

input_driver is set to "sdl", but commented.
input_joypad_driver is set to "udev"
video_driver variable is set to "gl"

The instructions on that file say that "depending on video driver, it might force a different input driver".

So I was wondering if I need to tweak any of those fields in order to make the gamepads work in Retroarch on this computer. The video card is a Nvidia GT218 (Ion).

Any suggestions are welcome! :)

mitu

Note: I've split your reply to a separate topic, don't bump very old topics.

You issue seems similar to https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/32891/ - try adding the vendor_id/product_id configuration options to the RetroArch config profile for the joystick and see if it solves your problem.

joaoluiz

@mitu said in Controller working in menu but not in Game:

try adding the vendor_id/product_id configuration options to the RetroArch config profile for the joystick

That worked, thank you so much!!!

I simply added the following to /opt/retropie/configs/all/retroarch-joypads/<my_gamepad_name>.cfg

input_vendor_id = 1411
input_product_id = 8288

(I got these numbers from the "not configured" overlay error message that popped up when I was starting a game)

Now, when I start a game, the overlay says the gamepad is configured and everything works as expected.

Do you have any idea as to why this was needed on this computer?

I mean, I never had to do this sort of manual editing of cfg files in my previous installs of Retropie, and this is the same gamepad I used on my previous installs, so this is either something related to my computer's hardware, or something related to Linux Mint 21, or something related to a recent update of retropie and/or retroarch...

Thank you again for helping me solving this, and I'm sorry for bumping the old topic! ;)

mitu

@joaoluiz said in Controller working in menu but not in Game:

Do you have any idea as to why this was needed on this computer?

Because the distro's libSDL is newer and the joystick's name is different because of it (spaces are trimmed, SDL tries to apply some common naming for some controlls, etc.).

There's an issue opened for this https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/issues/3398 and we tried to fix this with a SDL patch, but I think in the future we'll just export the vendor/product IDs to the config file in order to appease RetroArch. Note that this applies only when the SDL version of the distro is used, on a RPI the SDL provided by RetroPie doesn't exhibit this behavior.