The RetroPie Docs have a very detailed chapter about Spinners, Trackballs, Lightguns, Mice .

For the fine tuning of the spinners' sensitivity for each game, I used MAME`s own so-called tab menu that comes up when you press the tab key. See this video about how to do that:

Two more useful references about spinners:

http://wiki.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/Spinners_and_Dials http://wiki.arcadecontrols.com/index.php/Spinner_Turn_Count

@mitu OK I figured it out. Fist i got into Stargate on RetroPie and re-assigned the game controls to different keys using Tab. "Input, this game". F is fire, T is thrust, H is hyperspace, 1 is player1 start, 2 is player2 start, S is smart bomb, I is inviso, R is reverse, arrow up is UP, arrow down is DOWN. This makes my head easier to remember. Then I went back into EmStation, disconnected the USB gamepad and reconfigured the keyboard as main controller. I set key 1 as Start and key 2 as Select. I also set key T as B and key F as A. Down at the bottom of the configure menu I left hotkey blank and when asked, I selected Yes. I also went into RetroArch/Settings/Input/Hotkey Binds and made sure Press Quit Twice is set to OFF. So to exit the game now I press 1 and 2 together and it brings me back to EmStation. And when the Pi is in the cabinet (hooked up to iPac2), I can work through the EmStation using the Stargate control buttons and never need a keyboard or gamepad again.

A connection that becomes loose? "The issue comes back."

Here'a one-liner that will provide the event device from an joystick input device (here for /dev/input/js0):

readlink -f /dev/input/by-path/`udevadm info /dev/input/js0 | grep ID_PATH= | awk -F= ' { print $2 }'`-event-joystick

You can also check with cat /proc/bus/input/devices to see which event device is associated with a /dev/input/jsX device.

Alas, I can't help you with that. But if you can't find information about ZDE internals, you could also try to find information about USB HID device specifications in general, as the encoders "just" convert the raw signals to those of a joystick-like USB HID.

Sorry for the delay in replying to this. Just wanted to update this post.

Ok so it looks like the joystick inputs, Start, Select and Buttons A and B cannot be skipped but once I get past those inputs I can skip away and save the config (by getting to the end).

So I just took some spare buttons I have and plugged them into the encoder and then once they were mapped I removed the psychical buttons I don't want leaving only one in my case.

Thanks to Mitu for the help