Hm, this is a RetroPie dedicated forum. You may want to try a forum for PS3 console owners ?

well that is the answer. thanks to both of you. Thought I had to forget controllers, uninstall driver, and then start over. I was also having the same issue with Cyber Lip but assuming the same thing. Thanks.

@mitu solved it!!!

On the driver screen for controllers I selected uninstall all, then reinstalled ps3 controller only.

Connected to player 1 immediately.

Thanks for your advice.
OJ

@markt correct. As I said, and from reading your jstest tests, your joysticks are effectively being recognized as analogs correctly, it's just that they don't really map to the trackball the way you think they could.

You may try another emulator (lr-fba vs lr-mame vs AdvMame) and see if they handle it differently, or maybe someone has a different idea on how to configure it to make it work the way you want.

I've using a cheap red and a cheap blue ps3/ps1 look alike from a famous chinese webstore without any problems. The ones I use are wired (make sure to get ones with enough cable length) and work great with my rpi2.

So, hotkey(PlayStation button) + start, seemed to actually worked.
Maybe this got changed and the info not updated.

@Spiky well that would be a definite sign of a bootleg.