Thanks all for your advice, I much appreciate it! I'll ensure the buttons are mapped

Y X L
B A R

and I'll give fbneo a go as well - seems like it may have other advantages, although mame seems to run fine so far on a raspberry pi 3

@sleve_mcdichael said in Do I Need to Backup .bak Files?:

@AlphaBetaPie it's not conflicting, we are telling you the same thing. The backups are never used by RetroPie, but you may choose to manually restore one if you wish. It is as Exar said, just a record of what the settings were, before the most recent change.

When you make a change, the current settings are written to backup (overwriting the old backup, if one exists, which is then lost forever) and the new settings are written to the active config (overwriting the old active config, which is now preserved, temporarily, in the backup.)

Makes sense, thanks for clarifying. I am running things in kiosk mode 99% of the time, and I don't intend for anyone to make any changes if I can help it (myself included, as I'll have it set the way I want when I do my initial setup). So it seems like the config file is the only real necessary one. Thanks!

@mitu I did all that you suggested and was able to get the inputs to work after I remapped them again.

There is still a mismatch between what the controller config says and what the input port binds say though. Its as if the input binds themselves are labeled incorrectly. I highlighted an example of the discrepancy below.

Untitled.png

Think I'm alone in seeing this or could this be a broader issue that someone should be made aware of?

Thanks for your help btw!

@mahoneyt944 actually some games in mame2003 support analog! eg afterburner, outun. but yes, to use analog in games that have native digital controls, you need to use the retroarch 'analog to digital' option (although i would instead recommend setting via the configuration editor as RGUI meddling can be dangerous).

but note that if you enable it globally for the lr-mame2003, you will lose analog controls in natively analog games (although that's only a handful).

Is it possible to change the keymapping in retropie?

Uh dang, I need to make some retractions here.

I went back to re-examine the joystick circuitry and stuff and it looks like the thumbstick works fine at any voltage. (I felt my logic was odd when lying in bed the other day). The "lopsided-ness" I was talking about is actually caused by setting the range incorrectly. Ignore what I said for #1 in the previous post. The thumbstick appears to behave the same with 1.8V as with 5V (from a design standpoint, you'll probably save a little power by driving it at 1.8V).

Most modern joysticks expect something in the range of -32767 to +32767 with the center/neutral point (when the joystick is not being touched) being 0. Why? Because this is the min and max values you can represent with a signed 16 bit integer. To be extremely pedantic, you can actually go to -32768, but we pretend it's -32767 to make it symmetric.

When I did the mapping function, I take an input range of values going from ~70 to ~325 to 0 <-> 16384. I think this is where the "lopsided-ness" comes in. I'm using a built in function from the Arduino library called map() so I don't exactly know what is going on, but it places the center point somewhere around 4000 instead of ~8150 as you would expect. This isn't a problem if the output range is -32767 to 32767 for some reason.

Any luck with this,?

Use the core input remapping feature - https://retropie.org.uk/docs/RetroArch-Configuration/#core-input-remapping.

@mitu Ah I see.. I was always getting confused when I looked at cfg files and saw the # lines, just cos they looked nothing like technical instruction/code to me 😊. Glad I cleared that up...

So for my own reference I could put a # line in saying here are my latest attempts at the control inputs THEN after after that start that actual control inputs (WITHOUT #)?

@respite If you don't like the GUI, then on the same page there's an explanation on how to override the controls for a certain system - MD/Genesis in your case - https://retropie.org.uk/docs/RetroArch-Configuration/#example-per-system-control-override-retroarchcfg. The file you need to edit is the retroarch.cfg in your /opt/retropie/configs/megadrive folder.

This topic is a bit old, but I had a similar issue and found the root issue so it may help you or others in the future.
https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/28291/right-analog-one-direction-is-ignored/2

Long story short, maybe EmulationStation gamepad mapping configurator 'dead-zone' is too big for your gamepad.

@MM007 It happens. I've come to realize that about five minutes after I request help I'll almost always figure out the solution.

@roycebryan You can certainly do that (using a cfg file for each ROM).
Using the Core input mapping and creating an remap per game would be similar - the config file would saved in the RetroArch overrides folder.

i ended up working around this by using a different version of mame (lr 2000 instead of lr 2010). So this might mean it was a MAME config, like i messed with the inputs in the MAME menu? I know i tried to go through those folders and nuke the default.cfg files, but perhaps there was another spot, or its just something else. Also magically i got the XMB menu after a reboot, so its a lot easier to see which user an input setting belongs to, phew!

Thanks again, man. It seems I've been editing a core-specific cfg file which overrided the "all" retroarch.cfg file but I couldn't edit it from retropie, had to edit it by SSL. Now all my binds are as I want 'em.

Thanks!