Configuring I-Pac2

[jkristof]

I recently picked up an I-pac2 to use in my MAME cabinet and I was wondering if anyone knew what I need to do to configure the buttons in RetroPie or if it automatically configures itself?

[rbaker]

@jkristof I have purchased the ipac2. It has caused me some problems. I will detail them here for you. There are many resources on the web that discuss it but my problems seem to be with retroarch configurations. Have a good read of this thread first. Now I have experimented with Joypads, PS controllers and keyboards and they all work perfectly so when I built the cabinet and invested in an ipac2, I expected the same. For non retroarch based emulations like MAME4ALL and AdvMAME, it worked instantly and perfectly as it is already configured for MAME so in answer to your question, if you wire it correctly, it will play MAME games easily. However, I wanted to run libretro emulations so that certain games can run using FBA and NEOGEO roms. I made a mistake in following the autodetect sequence of retropie for the ipac which appears to be detected as a joypad. If you follow this then try to edit your configs, there will be problems in getting player 2 to work. I could not solve it for days and was about to give up. I was confused that the ipac was giving perfect key strokes like a keyboard but retroarch was not having it. The answer for me was to configure a normal keyboard first that was detected as a keyboard. Configure everything using it then disconnect it. If you then edit retroarch accordingly and reboot, ES will not ask to configure your controls and both sticks and buttons will follow the mappings in retroarch.cfg. If you don't configure a keyboard first, there will be issues if you follow auto detect. Even though the ipac detects key presses from a keyboard, it is not detected as one. According to the other threads on this forum, the firmware that is supplied makes the ipac appear as a joypad but there are other firmwares available here. Hope this helps you.