@mitu Before I considered dismantling the buttons from my arcade, I found this other command called jstest, which allowed me to see on the command line what each button was configured to on the USB encoder.

Once I ran jstest /dev/input/js0 for player 1 controls and jstest /dev/input/js1 for player 2 controls, Player 1 appeared to be configured correctly with buttons A and B. However, Player 2 clearly is the one not configured correctly. Here I finally found my problem where player 2 had buttons A and B setup to the wrong physical pins of the USB encoder.

Now that I had SW proof of my mistake, I disassembled my controller case and flipped the connections for those two buttons on player 2 onto the USB encoder. Put everything back the way it was, and behold my arcade is now acting correctly with both controls synced up.

Thank you very much @mitu for your suggestion. I do appreciate it.

@mitu Good call! I'm not sure how much power it's pulling, but setting over_voltage to 2 definitely makes it last longer, though not completely staying on all the time. Trying with setting it to 3 right now and that seems to be going strong!

Is your PI configured to boot from USB (not only from sdcard) ?
Check out the Pi 4 Boot Diagnostics page to determine that - look for the 'boot mode' configuration that is shown when you start and see if it includes USB.

@mitu used all the resolutions but they had the same issue. I fixed it by making the bars smaller and modifying some code. Here is what i did. Reference if someone comes with same problem.

First here the two smaller images. https://imgur.com/a/BbOfzr7
I named them gamelist_outline_smaller.png and gamelist_background_smaller.png

Uploaded this files to my pi on /etc/emulationstation/themes/snes-mini/art
then modified the setup xml with

sudo nano /etc/emulationstation/themes/snes-mini/layouts/setup.xml

replaced both paths with the new images like this example

<image name="gamelist_background" extra="true"> <path>./../art/gamelist_background_smaller.png</path>

since my resolution is using 4x3 i went and

sudo nano /etc/emulationstation/themes/snes-mini/layouts/4x3setup.xml

i replaced gamelist outline so it alignscorrectly, with this code

<image name="gamelist_outline" extra="true"> <origin>0.5 0.5</origin> <pos>0.7055555555555556 0.5</pos>

and done

Everything seems okay now. I had a Linux system I needed to set up. (Others were in use and I couldn't easily use them for this.) I got it up, added GPartEd (which, interestingly, did not include GPart as a dependency) and read the card from there. GPartEd could not find anything wrong with the partitions on the card, but after I used it to read and very, the card worked when I put it in the Pi!

I didn't write anything to this device, in Mac or Linux, so my guess is that GPart or GPartEd did something while just reading. Maybe it had trouble with a few bytes or when it wrote a date, it updated something else. I don't know, but just reading it and having GPart look at it was enough that the card started working when I tested it.

It's worth noting that when I booted it with my Pi, the system did have issues with partitions and scanned them, but found no errors.

I'll be taking it down and testing it in the arcade setup this evening.

I just updated to the Beta version for Raspberry Pi 4 and it seems to be working. Thanks!

FWIW, I ran into this issue as well after updating. Going into Raspi-Config and changing the audio from Auto to HDMI fixed the issue for me.

@greengrounds but yeah put the power supply into that hub. Then the power supply is giving power to the controller and the pi.

@FakedPotato with no information given, it's hard to help. https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/3/read-this-first
Maybe post the config files that you have created? What controller? Power Supply? Wiring diagrams? Photographs?

@SmackAttack86 Please add more info about your system, as requested in https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/3/read-this-first.

EDIT: make sure the usbromservice is installed, on a PC is no longer installed automatically, you need to install it first from the optional packages section.

@mitu it should be called Rasputin.

@ZioDarkmage
sudo fsck.fat /dev/sda1
I always have this where it says it was not properly umounted. I'm looking into it.
Oh well, It is probably nothing.

@brand said in Retroarch crashes when launching games (ES Windows 10):

What should I do?

Make sure your RetroArch works, this is not an Emulationstation problem. Also, this is a RetroPie forum, not a general RetroArch forum - you might want to try the libretro forums if you have problems using RetroArch on Windows.

@mitu that makes sense, and i'm actually thinking the updates crossed over each other, making the update confuse each other, retropie and etc. I should have thought of this, but anyways, thank you for clarification, that's all I really needed to know

Tried another cable anyways, no luck. This is a first for me.

@Outlawedpizza that's not how it works - we don't work for you. I will remove your account.

@OregonPacifist there isn't anything magical about it. You can put those roms back into the arcade folder and they will work. You just need to change the default emulator in the runcommand menu. Definitely should read the documents links previously posted.

@mitu It works just fine within EmulationStation, but once I start RetroArch everything freezes until I connect the USB controller.

@mitu Sorry about that. I wasn't sure how to post the log file. So I ended putting some soldering some pins on it and putting it in a freeplay zero. I wiped the sd card and added the freeplay modded retropie (That was before I saw your post asking for the log file...). Weirdly enough a somewhat similar issue occurred again. The buttons stop responding and the pie pops up errors. Since I wiped the previous log and I can't access get my keyboard to work on the gba I don't think I can provide much to you. I talked to Ed from Freeplay and he suggested some things to try out. If it doesn't work I'm going to just try out a new raspberry pi and see if that's the problem. Thanks for taking the time to try and help me troubleshoot.