Suddenly having controller issues

[TheyCallMeBruce]

Hey folks -
So I've been playing around with my Pi for a few months now, and suddenly this past week, I started having a ton of controller issues. The system locked up while I was scraping a game (Jurassic Park II for the SNES), so I had to turn the power off, and when I restarted, my NES30 Pro was now flashing yellow.
After looking around online for a bit, I concluded that I might need to update my controller's firmware, which I did. The Pro connected to the Pi again, but suddenly start, select, and both analog sticks stopped working.
I have a wired 360 controller lying around, so I figured I'd try that out. I got it to connect no problem, and it works fine in the menus, but if I go to retroarch to set the controls for the games, when I close retroarch, the controller no longer works at all, even if I unplug and replug it. If I go straight to the games, several of the buttons don't work or are assigned incorrectly.
I'm kind of at a loss here. I was loving this thing, but this has really broken my momentum. Thanks in advance for any help you can provide.

I'm running Retropie on a Pi 3 B - I'm not sure what version I'm using, but I updated everything today. I'd be happy to check if someone wanted to let me know where to start.

Again, thanks for any help or counsel.

Update: On a lark, I pulled out a crappy USB controller I had and tried that. Same issues as with the 360 controller. It works on startup and lets me set the inputs within emulationstation, but after I go into retroarch to set the binds for the games, I quit out and then nothing works. I hit F4 and try again, and everything I did has disappeared.

[TheyCallMeBruce]

Still trying to figure this out - does anyone know if I could replace the controller config file currently on the pi with the original file? I'm using WinSCP to log into my Pi from my PC.

[pjft]

@TheyCallMeBruce I don't have a lot of ideas as to why that may be the case in returning to ES... On the Retroarch front where are you configuring the binds - is it in an emulator?

Are you per chance using xboxdrv?

[TheyCallMeBruce]

@pjft I'm getting to RetroArch from the ES menu. If I go into the game first, I can't open RetroArch.

I did install xboxdrv but nothing seems to have changed. Unless I'm not using it correctly?

[pjft]

@TheyCallMeBruce @mediamogul is our xboxdrv guru (title pending) but it seems there may be a few different things at play here.

RetroArch not saving the settings is one thing. You not being able to control ES when getting back from RetroArch is another one. I suspect they may be unrelated.

As for xboxdrv, it depends on when you installed it and how. If you had it installed a long ago prior to this things happening, I'd suspect it'd not be related to this.

If you open an emulator you can access the RetroArch menu by pressing select+X in your controller. Then you can configure the keys for the emulator, asking other options.

I believe that for the settings to the saved you need to explicitly safe them somewhere. If it's keys related, you may sort things out in the quick menu, controls, and then saving the remap settings for the emulator/core.

Let us know how it goes.

[TheyCallMeBruce]

@pjft I had actually changed my hotkey for the RA menu in-game to be R/L/down/Y, which was working before, but isn't anymore. Maybe I can use the keyboard to get in and then go from there.

I installed xboxdrv after this started, hoping it would fix the issue I was having with the 360 controller. It didn't appear to change anything.