I found out that the problem is caused by shader I applied to all liberto emulators,
I guess Atari800 emulator doesn't like shaders.
Disabled it for this specific emu and it's working now!
Thank you mitu for answer.

@Timmiejane You should submit a pull request to retropie on github for this.

if anyone is still interested in this, check out these cool devices on icode.com. they allow you to have up to 4 paddles or joysticks connected to you PC via usb. There is even a bluetooth version.

Atari paddles and joysticks usb adapter

I have not, but that's an interesting idea.

I know this is an old topic but, for anyone else trying to get this to work.

I have had moderate success with jzintv.

If you have downloaded from http://intellivisionrevolution.com/ultimatepong
Add “.rom” to the end of the file.

Can’t currently get the controller to work but keyboard works fine!

It works! Thank you so much!

@RetroResolution Thanks for taking the time to write this post, helped me :)

This is the solution of the problem:

Step 1

Launch any game

If the game starts automatically then everything is OK, otherwise one of these 2 conditions may occur:

1. Black screen

2.
2a. Atari logo and "Copyright 19 Atari" text
2b. Crash screen: "!!! The Atari computer has crashed !!!" and a series of options

If condition 1 occurs, you must do this:
a. Press F5 if you have the keyboard inserted, or X button on the joypad
The system will perform a "warm reset" and at this point you will arrive at condition 2.

Step 2

If you have the keyboard connected: press ALT + C, If you only have the joypad (not recommended, because many games require the keyboard), click A with the joypad on "Menu" and in the next menu click A with the joypad on "Cartridge Managment" Select "Cartridge: none" and press the enter key (or A with the joypad) (there may already be the name of the rom instead of "none", but it does not matter)
Now you should see the directory (atari800) with all the roms, and the rom you have chosen in the emulation station menu already selected Press the enter key (or A with the jpypad) on that same rom
*
A new menu will open: "Select Cartridge Type" Select "Standard XX KB Cartridge" (where XX may vary with 8, 16, 32 or 64 depending on the selected rom) and press the enter key (or A with the joypad) Then you will return to the menu: "Cartridge Management", press ESC and again ESC (or X and again X with the joypad)

The game will be launched!

* it may happen that the menu: "Select Cartridge Type" does not appear. No fear, just press ESC and again ESC (or X and again X with the jpypad) to launch the game.

@udb23 Thanks for sharing the original cardboard bezel scan and the bezels that you created based on it. I wanted something slightly different to the bezel that you shared already, and came up with this:
asteroid-w-overhang-example.jpg

I'm using lr-mame2003-plus, and wanted an "integer resolution" bezel to support this.

I found that lr-mame2003-plus has better resolution core options than fbneo in my quick comparison. Two resolutions that the core offers that work well for me are 640x480 (with 2x integer scaling in retroarch) and 1280x960 (with the beam width = 2 set as a core option).

If anyone is interested I've put my bezel attempts here: https://github.com/busywait/retroboxes/tree/main/overlay/Asteroids

There does seem to be a little problem with letterboxing (black bars) at the top and bottom. Does anyone have any idea why lr-mame2003-plus doesn't fill the whole 960 height with the game? I ended up setting a custom resolution of 1280x1060 in the game.zip.cfg that does fill the space.

hey guys, I own that Joystick , but Retropie won't recognise, when I hit any buttons (hold a button to configure..). On my windows machine it's detected and working as "xbox 360 Controller".

Any idea what I could try to get it work within Retropie?

@arrowhead The driver is available to be installed from the RetroPie setup menu - in the Manage Packages / Manage driver packages section, so you don't need to install it manually. In fact, this is explained in the page I quoted, in the Installation section.

@dudleydes @edmaul69

That's great, thanks both. I think this post has definitely made it clear on how to change the difficulty as well as other settings.

I think this thread can be marked as resolved.

Thanks again.

Thanks that's all I needed to hear.

to answer your second question, i've had good results with this shader set: https://github.com/aybe/RetroArch-shaders

just grab the .glsl & .glslp files for the ones you want and drop them in ~/.config/retroarch/shaders

.exe and .bat files will appear in the "pc" section of EmulationStation, so you can surely put the needed commands into a batch file, yes.