@petrockblog Thanks for the reply.
Shorting the wires (just touching the signal and the ground together) doesn't solve the problem. I should have mentioned earlier that the controlblock works perfectly with my pi2, but I'm trying to upgrade.
I can't get the jtest to work. I can't find the command in /dev/input.
The more I'm playing around with this I think it is a problem with my retropie install, but I can't figure out what