Glad to hear that you are making progress! It should always be possible to use the ControlBlock together with any USB controller. You would just need to run the input configuration for each device on EmulationStation. All controller types should be recognised and working afterwards. Regarding your question about the need for an additional keyboard: What you would need to do is to configure the emulators such that you have full control with your arcade / gamepad controls only. That should be possible. Hope that helps!

Thanks for getting back to me, and thanks for making fantastic little bits of hardware, I hope it works out with the 3A+ I ordered the B model in the end, I figured that I might regret not having those extra USB ports down the line, and the larger footprint means I'll be forced into making a tidier build :)

Glad to hear that!

@m2306 I also need a few weeks to finish my stuff and get back to the Topic. I will keep you up to date as well!

@petrockblog I guessed as much, just me beeing a linux n00b. Thanks and sorry for wasting your time. Still, this could have been prevented with clearer instructions. It went fine with installing the software though, nice and easy to copy the commands, all clear there. Just small things like this one that you who know command line better maybe don’t realize that others don’t get.. Thanks again.

@m2306 Yes, it's possible to use different gamepads as P1, depending on the system you play or choose at runtime. You can use Meleu's joystick selection tool to do that.

OK, this is probably my last post on this matter. It isn't solved, by any stretch of the imagination, but i do have a workaround! I don't believe that the short has fried anything, the controlblock is still working exactly as advertised, but it DID scramble the outputs. All the outputs are still there, just in different places! If it is possible to re-flash the firmware i think it would restore the normal operation, but that is just a hunch, and as it stands now i am not willing to take the risk. Just in case someone out there ever has a similar problem i'm posting how i rewired the controlblock: WARNING! WARNING! WARNING! WARNING! WARNING! WARNING! WARNING! WARNING! WARNING! WARNING! WARNING! THIS WON'T WORK ON YOUR SYSTEM, IT FIXED MY SYSTEM ONLY. I ONLY POST HERE TO SHOW WHAT THE SHORT DID TO MY CONTROLBLOCK! In the end i rewired my project to match the new outputs of the scrambled Controlblock as follows:! Hope that helps, if anyone else finds themself in a similar situation! END WARNING! END WARNING! END WARNING! END WARNING! END WARNING! END WARNING! END WARNING! END WARNING!

A little more searching and I found a great thread that describes this: https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/17533/how-do-i-get-these-led-arcade-buttons-to-light-up

I ran the installation with the new instructions and it still fails. I've tried both the standard install process as well as the quick installation. Each time I used a clean install of RetroPie 4.4

I have just pushed an update for the ControlBlock driver. You can now connect a button to P2, "A": Pressing that button will lead to a simulated press of Start + B, as well as a keyboard button press of "F1". Does this work for you?

Glad to hear that you found the problem.

Glad to hear that! I find your hardware setup very clear and logical. So far, I did not find anything on the driver site. You mean it was an issue with a configuration file of RetroArch, right?

I just pushed an update for the ControlBlock driver. The four-player feature should work again now! Sorry for this bug!

@caver01 I second this. On the BYOAC forums there's lot of advice to find regarding the build itself, but note that not everyone thinks very highly of Raspberry Pi's there, so questions regarding this is better asked in this excellent site :)

Connected the leads straight from the 5v pins directly to the male side of the power and everything worked fine, so it is the nintendo side of the barrel jack.. i've got a new one on order so... This is resolved!

The new GamepadBlock supports switching between the various controller modes via a virtual COM port. For the ControlBlock a Bash script could be written that changes the controlblockservice.cfg file and reloads the ControlBlock service. I have not had time to work on that yet, though.