Getting emulators to see controller input as a keyboard?

Loxley

Hello,
Over the last few months I've been casually putting together some portable raspberry-pi emulator consoles. The most recent one I've put together is using a pi-zero and built within an original gameboy case. I purchased a gameboy controller pcb (this one http://store.kitsch-bent.com/product/common-ground-dmg-button-pcb) so that i could use the original buttons and such(A, B, START, SELECT, UP, DOWN, LEFT, RIGHT). Using Adafruits RetroGame I was FINALLY able to get emulation-station to work with the controls! However I can only navigate the menus of emulation station... as soon as i launch a game the emulator will not recognize my button inputs. I've mapped the gameboy buttons to keyboard inputs (the same ones that an actual keyboard uses if plugged in to control) but for some reason the emulators still wont recognize my gameboy pcb inputs!

any ideas?
thanks!

mediamogul

@Loxley

You can map your controller pcb to a virtual keyboad device using the built-in xboxdrv.

Keyboard Emulation

The following configuration will cause xboxdrv to emulate a keyboard, which can be useful for games that are played with keyboard, like Flash games or games that don't support a joystick. Since different games use different keyboard keys you might have to adjust the keybindings to fit the game:

$ xboxdrv
--ui-clear
--ui-buttonmap a=XK_a,b=XK_b,x=XK_x,y=XK_y
--ui-buttonmap dl=XK_Left,dr=XK_Right,du=XK_Up,dd=XK_Down

Taken from:
http://pingus.seul.org/~grumbel/xboxdrv/xboxdrv.html

There is also "Linux Joystick Mapper" that is very similar and a good choice as well. It's not included with RetroPie, so you'll have to make and install it.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/linuxjoymap/