Well, the usual troubleshooting steps are

start with the RetroPie image from retropie.org.uk/download. It's a tested and mostly stock Raspbian image and the best baseline system to start experimenting. make sure you have an adequate power supply and you don't get any under-voltage warnings. test if the device is detected by the OS by running a few command line utilities # see what USB devices are connected with lsusb # see what input devices are detected by the OS and what kind (gamepad/keyboard/mouse/etc.) cat /proc/bus/input/devices test if the device inputs are registered in the system by running a few joystick/gamepad testing programs fromt the command line that capture the button/joypad/d-pad presses and show them on the terminal: # 1st joystick jstest /dev/input/js0 # 2nd joystick jstest /dev/input/js1 # another testing utility evtest

...

@zmb187 Please add more information about your system as asked in https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/3/read-this-first.

What controller types ? Are you supplying enough power to the PI with a proper power source ?

@mitu I finally tracked down the issue. When the triggers on the controller were initially set the left triggers release was set as the right triggers pull. The system was registering a constant trigger pull and mucking everything up. Thank you for your help though.

@europadecas Despite my arcade, electronics, Linux, and coding experience I found Retropie to be a very complex and difficult to manage project. Kudos to the devs for integrating this many emulators into a single environment, and kudos to the support forum here for the help!

@johnodon said in What buttons should I press? A controller cheat sheet:

@chipsnblip said in What buttons should I press? A controller cheat sheet:

https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki/runcommand#adding-custom-launching-images

You can also set how much time this will be displayed before launching the game. What would be a nice option is if you could set it to stay onscreen until a button is pushed. I don't think this is available today.

John

pressing q or escape on the keyboard will close the image and launch the game, then you can set image_delay to a high number of seconds. the only thing left to do would be map one of those 2 keys to your controller, but i'm unsure if this would require any changes to the scripts in ~/RetroPie-Setup/scriptmodules/supplementary/runcommand/

gotcha. let me refresh ans use that image. thanks for the feedback.

@colty250 Your problem is not a common occurrence, so there's must be some configuration that's not correct. Please provide the information asked in order to be able to diagnose it.

This is exactly what I was looking for and it worked, thanks a lot!

@stoney66 Thanks for the advice. I've got a config for /opt/retropie/configs/all/retroarch-joypads/USB\ Gamepad\ .cfg that looks reasonable, but still nothing is working. I have remapped them all repeatedly, and still no love. Any other ideas?

@columbo Yes, you can.

@mitu This is what I’m talking about: xboxdrv. Scroll to the xboxdrv section and it talks about how this was broken. I ran into this on either retropie 4.3 or 4.2. I can only assume it is still broken, but I’ll give it a try again.

@g6delta No problem, I hope it solved your problem

@benbaron

FWIW I read on another forum about someone havin the exact same issue with Wii U Pro controllers. They ended up buying a dongle and it resolved the problem.

@jonnykesh Thanks for your answers and tips!
I re-download the Retropie image and ApplePi-Baker, formatted the SD card and installed the image all over again. The result was the same, the controllers would not respond.
I then got my hands on another Raspberry Pi Zero W, inserted the SD card with the same image, booted up and everything works perfectly now. Both controllers and the keyboard.
So I guess you were right, that it was an issue with the Pi.
Thanks! :)

I think I have now resolved this issue - for anyone else who has suffered from similar woes, I quit out of Emulation Station and did

sudo rpi-update

to update the firmware. Now the left and up axes seem to be recognised properly - watch this space to see if I have other problems! (I'll bet good money that I do lol)