@wesw02 Did you try to manually set the joystick order in retropie-setup for the emulator you are using?

I had the problem that 1 out of 10 times, when loading a game, the player1 controller was assigned to player2.

@mitu I've got it working now, I had a typo in my file, I had missed out the / before dev/input/. Schoolboy error but sorted now. Many thanks for the pointers and your help. Working between my PC and the cabinet is quite tricky. I'll need to get SSH sorted out so I can do the edits from the PC direct.

@Dinsdale Your screenshot shows an error that happens during pairing in the Bluetooth setup - possibly a timeout during the process. Re-connection is handled by the OS, there's no RetroPie script involved afterwards - so I don't think that's the problem.

EDIT: you can try and pair the controller manually - see https://approxeng.github.io/approxeng.input/bluetooth.html, the Pairing with Bluetoothctl section).

@jerrymrivera Please don't bump old forum posts.
Create a new topic and explain your problem, adding the relevant info about your setup, as explained in https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/3/read-this-first.

Thanks @mitu, that'll get me started :D

Many thanks for the info on evdev. I thought it wasn't being used since evdev-joystick --l doesn't show anything, but the gamepad was being assigned to /dev/input/eventX

I ended up using this solution:
https://joaorb64.github.io/2018/02/14/Configuring-a-Nintendo-Switch-Pro-Controller-on-Linux.html

There doesn't seem to be anything special about the devices - I see you only have 1 gamepad (which is considered by mame2000), but there are also a few keyboard and mice attached. Barring any permission problems (unlikely), I don't see why RetroArch excludes them - might be something to do with the core ?
Can you try running with Mame2003 or other RetroArch core (FBAlpha) to see if this changes anything ?

@buzz Which 8bitdo controllers do you use? Are these your primary? I bought and set up a pair of SN30s in January(they seem to be a discontinued version now, maybe for good reason?) for someone and they seemed to be fine for sidescrollers but were finnicky when charging. I want some low profile wireless controllers for travel to replace my ibuffalos but was curious if the Pro line is halfway decent for analog based games like N64 or PSX.

Thank you for your suggestions.
What I cannot understand is why the things work with just a restart of the daemon after the game was launched. I havent changed something in a config file, I did not change my source or driver, just restart et voila!

Here the last lines of the dmesg lines, just in case it points someone to a solution. One can see the restarts of the key daemon, probably not very helpful

[ 1943.989371] input: myrasp-uinput as /devices/virtual/input/input22
[ 1967.998192] input: myrasp-uinput as /devices/virtual/input/input23
[ 2005.033208] input: myrasp-uinput as /devices/virtual/input/input24

I will have a look at what you said.

Very nice would be an "example" where somebody is using "udev" (uinput) like I do with success.

This 20 lines example would just open a virtual input device and send a "5" every lets say 10 seconds. The test then is:
Start ES with USB keyboard, start the example via SSH, in ES navigate with the USB keyboard to any "lr-mame2003" game, start the game and wait for the "coin in" event with receiving the next "5".
I say it will not happen. Now do nothing but restart the example and suddenly the coin is in!

This should also be very easily reproducible.