Arcade control woes

jlazore2

I am wondering what I need to do differently to get my arcade cabinet controls working the way I want them to. I have a two joystick setup with 6 buttons for each player. Also have player one and two start and coin insert buttons. Each player has a USB control board that gets detected as dragon USB devices in retro arch/emulation station. I am able to bind all for both devices in retro arch and es. When I go into mame emulator sometimes the joystick works and sometimes the buttons work too. I attached the Kb and the tab no longer gets me into the mame setup menu. When I can get into the mame setup menu it seems like it doesn't recognize all of the buttons and nothing for player 2. If I go to the command prompt and do the jstest script all joystick and button inputs are registering. I would love to configure a hot key combo using the joystick to get to the mame menu. And most of all I would love for mame to recognize all joystick and buttons so I can configure to my liking.

Please help.

caver01

@jlazore2 it would help to know which version of MAME you are running.

jlazore2

It looks like my setup uses either LR-FBALPHA and LR-MAME2003. I am able to use the kb to get into the menu in the LR-MAME2003 but not the FBALPHA. I assume because the mame menu does not exist in that emulator??? So how would I change the button configs for LR-FBALPHA then? I did successfully change the buttons for the global config for the LR-MAME2003 version.

Thanks

caver01

@jlazore2 You are correct. FBA does not have the menu. However, since you are using the libretro core version, you can map controls using RetroArch. I usually go about that in manual fashion by editing a config file. Depending on your setup, you can start with the retroarch.cfg in /opt/retroarch/configs/all/. However, changing your mapping in this file will also affect your other lr-core, lr-mame2003! They share the same config initially. However, as you discovered, you can override the controls per-game or in general in MAME, but this is not changing the base config in RetroArch. Think of what you have been doing in the MAME GUI menu as translating the underlying configuration for just that emulator.

Anyway, you can also add control configs for just lr-fbalpha by putting the config lines/change into the retroarch.cfg in /opt/retropie/configs/fba/. This would allow you to make mapping decisions for just this emu without affecting lr-mame2003 and messing up your "translated controls" that you configured using that emulator's GUI menu.

Finally, if you want to change controls per ROM for lr-fbalpha, you can also drop a .cfg file next to the rom using the same name as the rom romname.zip.cfg and the controls you set inside this file would be for just the single game.

It is confusing with all of the layers. I usually start with a retroarch.cfg that suits the most games. Then, because I use the Arcade folder, I have secondary setups per ROM, with MAME being the exception because I can easily override using the GUI menu.

jlazore2

@caver01 Thanks for you help. This definitely has shed some light on this for me!