The reason for no buttons lighting up upon entering a rom can be found here (this fix will possibly work as long as you are getting lights flashing while in the retropie menu system):

https://retroarcadebuild.blogspot.com/2023/11/rgbcommander-update.html

@Robinson You don't need a bios for 2600, see : https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Atari-2600/

@sleve_mcdichael Oh, I see! God I feel an idiot haha .. I'll try that out, but that makes sense.

For what it's worth, I bought one of these SJ@JX controllers on alix, and it wasn't detecting as a USB gamepad (or wasn't working at all).

I download and ran the .exe that @bryantjblair shared and it's now working and detecting as I'd expect.

Well... I just figured out what was causing this, although I still don't understand why it was causing it, so if anyone has any suggestions I'd still like to hear them.

I start EmulationStation with the "screensize" command line parameter, because I'm running at 240p on a CRT with a super-resolution (1920x240), and if I don't do that Emulationstation gets confused and scales things wrong. I then use XWindow's built-in scaling to scale EmulationStation to the full width of the screen.

This morning I changed it from this:

--screensize 300 225

to this:

--screensize 300 222

because a few lines were getting cut off on the bottom. I neglected to change the horizontal though, I should have changed it to 296, to keep the aspect ratio at 4:3. Apparently it was the aspect ratio change, even though it was tiny, that screwed the buttons up.

I had moved on to editing my theme and completely forgotten about making that change by the time I noticed the messed up buttons. Oops. :-)

@MSP430 so far none of the systems you mentioned go over the resolution of your display. The PlayStation has a few games that go over, like tekken 3, or silent hill in the menus, but I’m sure it’ll look fine on a lower resolution display, if not a tad fuzzy and text might be harder to read in the higher resolutions.
Just know that PlayStation and especially n64 will be iffy on a pi zero. Not sure about a zero 2 for PlayStation, but n64 on a pi4 has many performance issues which is much more powerful than any zero.

@barbudreadmon thank you, I did end up remapping the controllers.

@mitu I actually figured it out myself. I updated retropie and it’s all good now. I actually wiped out my entire retropie burning the Sinden light gun image on my sd card. I can’t figure out how to do this without wiping everything out.

@denyou Have you looked into mapping buttons via config alterations?
(like https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Xbox-360-Controller/)
Just a friendly reminder: always make a backup before messing with CFG files.

What drivers are you using?
What hardware are you using?

And there's this on every page:
"Please do not post a support request without first reading and following the advice in https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/3/read-this-first"

There's actually some pretty helpful info there and not "legalese".

@cnoto Yeah, I wanted to make sure that save and load would still work, unless I'm thinking about how they work incorrectly.

You can choose a hotkey enable button when you configure your gamepad and this will set it also in RetroArch so you can trigger an action with 2 button combos - see https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Controller-Configuration/#hotkey.
However, this is an emulator feature (RetroArch) and not a global/general input configuration option that will work in any program (including EmulationStation).

Demo video:

The mappings for N64 are described in the emulators doc page - https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Nintendo-64/. If you wish to change it, you can either use RetroArch's input remapping for the lr-mupen64/lr-mupen64-next emulators or editing the InputAutoCfg.ini for the standalone mupen64plus emulator.

I had tried all 3 methods on my pi 3. I used the manual cmake steps, I had tried the wget install.sh method, and I had also tried the GUI option in the retroarch "optional package" menu. I ran into no errors during any method, but nothing worked. Nothing was responsive in jstest. When performing the GUI option pi 2.5, it worked. (I didn't try other 2 methods on the pi 2.5 as my first attempt worked).

I think its my pi. I bought it a few years ago and this was my first time trying to use the GPIO headers. I downloaded a pigpiod GPIO test script and it identified some of my pins as bad. I think I'll grab a pi 4.0 in the near future.

I made a video going over my gamepad design if anyone is curious.