If a hotkey_enable button or key is defined, no hotkeys will function unless the "enable" button is also pressed at the same time.

By default, there is no hotkey_enable keyboard key defined. With only the keyboard connected, the hotkeys will work individually.

But when you connect a USB gamepad, that gamepad's autoconfig is applied. The autoconfig does define a hotkey_enable button on the gamepads (usually Select).

In order to use keyboard hotkey functions when the gamepad is connected, you must either:

press the gamepad's hotkey_enable button while you press the keyboard hotkey key, or define a keyboard hotkey_enable key and use that, or remove or #disable the hotkey_enable function from your gamepad's autoconfig (you'll also need to remove or disable all other hotkey functions that share a button with any game action buttons), or unplug the gamepad.

Hotkeys only work on the keyboard or on P1 gamepad. If the gamepad is anything other than P1 it won't work, but it still defines the hotkey_enable so you still have to use it, one way or another, while the pad is connected.

Hi @mitu ,

I'm returning to advise you of my good fortune and to help any others who may have been in the same situation as me.

I had been using my Xarcade tank stick controller in "Mode 1" with the Xarcade2Jstick driver which meant that Retropie was recognising it as a keyboard (iPac-type encoder).

I have now switched the controller to "Mode 4" and omitted the driver which means that Retropie recognises the controller as two separate XBox 360 controllers.

I can now configure each side of the controller with identical mappings and any game/platform I wish to use the right side instead of the left side of the controller, I simply change the Port 1 binds for in Retroarch.

When I do this, Hotkey+Start (even on the righthand side) performs correctly and exits the game.

Thank you once again for your help mitu.

@jamietuley
Skyscraper is the one that I use for finding videos. I think I get videos from screenskraper.fr they aren't always the best videos, first 30 seconds of gameplay but they show the intro screen and are mostly uniform.
The only alternative that I know of is acquiring videos from https://emumovies.com/ and it requires an account, I found they have a sync download utility for adding them to your existing setup and I have not used this.

Here are some infos for mame's emulators and romsets, some of it should be discarded or modified most all of them cover a range, and I find the latest 0.208 works with lr-mame2010 but sometimes not advmame[3.9]

Advmame 0.94 MAME 0.94 Advmame 1.4 MAME 0.106 Advmame [3.9] MAME 0.106 - ??? MAME4ALL MAME 0.37b5 - ??? lr-mame2000 MAME 0.37b5 lr-mame2003 MAME 0.78 lr-mame2010 MAME 0.139 (under experimental packages) [build failure - ran out of memory] lr-mame2003plus MAME 0.78 - MAME 0.188 lr-mame2015 MAME 0.160 lr-mame2016 MAME 0.174 lr-mame MAME 0.208

They increment by decimal values, 0.208 is greater than 0.78. The lr-mame emulators on experimental all failed to compile, I think this has to do with running out of memory, I don't know if there is a solution, they probably don't perform well anyhow, and I think the others have been enhanced and modified for extended rom support and pi compatibility.

@alexp You can avoid all this by flashing the ipac2 to gamepad enabled firmware 1.39 and setting the buttons as Gamepad buttons. Both sides work and it is 1000x easier. ES configures everything easily, no extra cfgs needed.

Use this guide, but use the ipac2 instead of the miniipac.

https://forums.launchbox-app.com/topic/47100-how-to-xtension-arcade-emulator-edition-controller-as-dual-gamepads/

@meleu Yes your explanation about config save on exit makes sense.

I will not be doing it again.

0_1489662408640_upload-48b278be-cbb6-4eea-ac48-50d3dbf22b6e

If I navigate to this section on the UI it will only change the hotkeys for the system I am in at that moment
eg: Mega Drive?

All the other systems will still be set to the defaults?

Is there a way to change all the systems at once from putty like a master retroarch.cfg file?

Inside: /opt/retropie/configs/SYSTEM_NAME/retroarch.cfg.
If I go into each of the systems I use can I change the hotkeys for each system in this file?

@caver01 i'm unable to test either but if mame2010 does something different i could look into it, but i would have thought it wouldn't be respecting the api if it did anything different!