@mitu Well as I said, the Bluetooth functionality was working perfectly when setting up the 8bitdo controller and problems only began when the Pi was restarted. As regards the SD card, it's a 32GB card, branded 'Team' and was bought from a local computer store. To be honest, I've had my doubts about it, so I think I'm going to purchase a 32GB Sandisk Ultra card to replace it. I have also since sourced the official Raspberry Pi 5.1v 2.5A PSU to replace the one sent with my ABOX kit. So between the two new pieces of kit, I'll set up Retropie afresh and see how it goes.

Thanks for your patience and help with this issue, it's appreciated.

@Efriim no I haven’t tried that game. Thanks for finding the forum post about standalone psp exiting back to emulation station rather than the psp menu. Good to know since that was my main issue using standalone. Using the retroarch version now seems like a more viable option than it was before in terms of performance based on my testing and it is nice to have the GUI. But i will try this out on my experimental setup to try to confirm it works.

@tikimojo You could try using this video:

Assuming of course your xbox controller is model 1708

@Brutilus Did you install any driver for your controllers ?
Update your RetroPie installation (if you haven't done already) and reset your controller configuration, then try to install the ps3driver and pair your PS3 controllers. Make sure they work, then report back if they haven't.
You can debug your input configuratio/detection by looking at the Emulationstation's log file - in ~/.emulationstation/es_log.txt.

@mitu Yes. I accidentally disabled it. Re-enabling it fixed it all.
Thank you so much :)

@lmjiang1 Hi. I've been trying to get my M30 pad working with my Pi running Retropie, and it connects ok via Bluetooth, but my problem is that the controller won't recognise the R or C buttons when configuring it in Emulation Station. Do all your buttons work ok?

If I were to hazard a guess, I would say that changing over to a USB boot means that your USB ports are staying powered on when your system isn't running. You should probably just unplug the power source after shutdown.

It wasn't at the time, no. I dunno what the problem is.

@darth_wader I should note that the wireless adapters can be picked up for around $10-15 on Amazon and they work perfectly and easily allow connecting up to four controllers. I have used 3-4 different brands of them and have never had an issue.

@TheSausageKing after you map the keyboard are you pressing the button you mapped as "a" to ok the configuration? Once you do it, it can take 20 secs or so sometimes for the configuration to take effect.

@mitu Thank you.
For now I didn't find any game title which behaved unresponsive, so I'll keep it on 5 for now.

@thebarry1394 Thanks. It looks like somebody already submitted a request to be included in the upstream xpad project - https://github.com/paroj/xpad/pull/125 - so hopefully in the future it will be easily recognized, without manual patching.

My advice is to not use 'Save on Exit' and use Core/Game overrides for changes you want to add to the controls. If you want to have a global configuration setting applied to all Libretro cores, open RetroArch from the RetroPie system in Emulationstation, make your changes there (it will modify the global RetroArch config file) and use Save Configuration to save those changes. More details about the configuration structure used by RetroArch in RetroPie can be found here.

So @ExarKunIv , just update emulationstation and it now magically works?? Sweet! And no, you were not alone! I actually thought my controller was defective because it was doing this same thing over several very different builds.

@mitu Welp, that was easy! thanks! :D

What kind of controller ? Please add more info about your setup - https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/3/read-this-first.

@ByteThis Diffferent type of Bluetooth module, I believe. Could be wrong...