@caver01 thanks again. I read a bit now and I think I understand the role of retroarch, acting as an interface between emulationstation and the various emulators.
That clears up a lot!
You are right about the shift function on my ipac too.
But I cannot end the Vice version on Retropie - even when using a keyboard. I need to open the vice menu (F12) and then navigate to "Quit vice".
But it's okay. For C64 emulation I find myself grabbing for the keyboard quite often.

Cheers,

Robin

@RandoCalrisian It's pretty impressive how fast you moved through this problem to a solution. The community here is great!

I do agree regarding the emphasis on the hand-held controller method of defining inputs. My cocktail setup sounds similar to yours--three panel, vertical games played from the ends. Because most of the console emulators are horizontal, my default retroarch.cfg is setup with that in mind, but I have a lot of in game adjustments in lr-mame2003 GUI. For FBA my default mapping is a NeoGeo setup, yet that forces me to do per-rom configs for most fighter games. You are definitely doing the right thing, or rather, the necessary thing to get what you need. It's tricky, but I appreciate how flexible it is. The biggest win from my perspective with RetroArch is the shaders. It's so great to have passably realistic scanlines and curvature across multiple systems. The exception for me is vector arcade games which I use AdvanceMAME exclusively for it's ability to specify high resolution.

@AndersHP

It's been a while and I have since uninstalled Reicast, but if memory serves, I did have the res as low as possible. I might give it another day in court sometime soon.

@BuZz

Ah, that's too bad.

@mulder79
Hi did you get this to work in the end I have a similar problem with ipac 2