Write RetroArch Auto-Config files manually

[Antoine]

Hello,

I am currently configuring a retropie image for a friend and I wanted to make sure they had to do the minimum configuration by themselves.

In order to do that, for the particular case of controllers, I wished to pre-configure as many controllers as I could. Preferrably without actually having to plug in one of each.

Since RetroArch records the controller configuration the first time we plug it in in a folder (configs/all/retroarch/autoconfig/) to be used for future times the same kind of controller is plugged, I felt like I could write my own configuration files.

But in order to do that I need 2 things:

• to know the names of the controllers (e.g. RetroArch automatically named my own controller "Microsoft X-Box 360 pad.cfg";

• the associated commands (name for the controller + id for retroarch).

My plan is to pre-configure them as shown in the images of https://retropie.org.uk/docs/RetroArch-Configuration/#autoconfigurations (plus the hotkey and save management)

My issue is mainly that even after reading the documentation and several forum threads, I am still confused as how to proceed.

For example:

• I stumbled upon https://github.com/libretro/retroarch-joypad-autoconfig which seems to set the configuration of a whole lot of controllers. But after a closer look, the hotkeys are not set up apparently.

• I also do not understand the difference between configs/all/retroarch/autoconfig and configs/all/retroarch-joypads. For some reason, I cannot access the latter from the network shared folder (so I don't know what's in it), but everyone seems to talk about this one and not at all about the former...

• the documentation for specific controller also gives examples of those files.

I'm really lost how I should approach that issue.

Sorry for the long post, I just wanted my question to be as complete as possible.