Super Mario Bros (NES) Must Press Start with Player 2?

obsidianspider

I was testing out some controllers with new membranes in them today and thought I would test with good old Super Mario Bros, except I couldn’t get the game to start. At first I thought it was my controller, but I could get the start button to work in EmulationStation as well as in other NES games.

I am running RetroPie 4.3.12 (0481bb0) on a Pi 3 with a Raphnet BRD-4NES4SNES adapter and real SNES controllers.

What’s weird is I can start the game by plugging the controller into the Player 2 slot and pressing start. Of course I then have to switch back to Player 1 to control Mario.

What’s even weirder is that whatever that controller swap did, will stay in place even if I exit the emulator and go back to EmulationStation, play another game with a different emulator, then go back to Super Mario Bros.

This will continue to work until I reboot the Pi. It only seems to affect Super Mario Bros., and it seems recent, though I can’t say exactly when I last played it on this build (my Super Famicom Pi).

The problem exists in FCEUmm, Nestopia, and Quicknes.

I confirmed the game (same ROM) works fine on my other RetroPie builds (same version of RetroPie and emulators) which only use USB or GPIO controllers.

It’s only this one game. What’s going on?

obsidianspider

Just for the heck of it, I tried the FDS version, and exactly the same thing happens.

Also, if I do the player 2 swap to fix the problem, it also works for the NES version. Until a reboot.

This is weird.

obsidianspider

I’m stumped. Is there some sort of log I can look at to try to debug this? I know it’s a new problem because when trying different versions of the game I saw old save state files in the nes folder from 2017 and I definitely didn’t have to do any workarounds to start the game.

obsidianspider

This old post from another forum is the only thing I’m finding in my searching, but sadly it didn’t have a resolution.

Darksavior

@obsidianspider Not sure. I was having a similar problem with nes (fceumm) player 2 act as player 1 for some reason in the few games I tried. I previously installed meleu's joystick selection script to avoid problems like this, but it didn't seem to help. I didn't really troubleshoot further so I uninstalled fceumm and then reinstalled from source and that fixed my problem. I only use gpio snes pads for nes. Maybe an update did something, who knows. It's been a while since I've touched an nes game. I'm on latest stretch retropie.

edmaul69

@obsidianspider did you look in your roms folder and verify their isnt a config file for super mario bros in it?

obsidianspider

@Darksavior I might give a reinstall of fceumm and nestopia and quicknes a try, but I don't understand why it's only affecting Super Mario Bros and its variants. (Super Mario Bros on FDS has the same issue). I'm still using the stable jessie build.

@edmaul69 I just checked don't see a config file in there for anything. The only non-game or save file is the gamelist.xml and the images folder, which only contains images.

obsidianspider

@Darksavior I removed nestopia, fceumm, and quicknes, then reinstalled them all from source, per your suggestion, then I rebooted. The problem persists. :(

I confirmed other NES and FDS games are working properly after the reinstallation (a quick try with Super Mario Bros 3, Castlevania, Doki Doki Panic).

Darksavior

@obsidianspider Then it might be what @edmaul69 suggested that there might be a config file for that game only. You can also try another microsd with a fresh install to verify it's a config problem.

edmaul69

@obsidianspider i just thought of something. Can you look in your nes config folder too and make sure there isnt a super mario bros config in there either.

obsidianspider

@edmaul69 Which folder?

Also, the problem is present for the FDS version as well as the NES version. I've also confirmed the problem exists regardless of how I rename the file, so I would think that a config file is probably not the issue as I would assume it's looking for a file name?

obsidianspider

Today I updated to 4.3.13 (0ea0391) and tested again. The problem remains with fceumm, nestopia, and quicknes.

@meleu you're the master of multiple controllers. Do you have any suggestions of things I can do to try to debug/test this? If it was every game I would think it was something with my setup, but it's only Super Mario Bros. It's almost like it's something in the game itself.

pjft

Likely unrelated, but wasn't there something similar to this in Super Mario World for the SNES, or for the Super Mario All Stars?

Maybe it's something with the actual game.

Edit: maybe a similar approach helps with a game specific config file.

https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=78&t=79083

obsidianspider

I'd not heard of that with the All-Stars version.

What's got me stumped is why it started recently (I obviously don't play the game every single time I boot up my Pi). Something must have changed with Raspbian or RetroPie, but I can't figure out what. :-/

pjft

@obsidianspider I had updated the post. See if that could be a potential workaround.

obsidianspider

Hmm, maybe I could tell it just to use start from player 2. I'll have to read up more on how those config files work.

meleu

@obsidianspider I only read the OP, then sorry if I'm going to suggest something already said...

First thing to do to help us to help you: launch the game with verbose mode and then paste the runcommand.log somewhere.

After that, I would check is if there's a .cfg file for this game. It would override the configs at .../nes/retroarch.cfg and .../all/retroarch.cfg.

obsidianspider

I updated RetroPie this morning to 4.3.13 (6f5ada6) and then ran with verbose logging.

This is the log when I first tried the game

This is the log after I flipped to use Player 2 to press start, exited the game, then restarted it, and was able to use Player 1 to start the game

I used diffchecker.com to look for anything different and aside from some hex values due to memory mapping, they seem the same. :-/

I don't see any game specific configs and I'm pretty sure the logs also confirm that.

obsidianspider

Updating to 4.3.15 (609bbaa) did not resolve the issue.

I wish I could figure out what is changing when I plug a controller into "Player 2" and press Start that is somehow getting things working correctly for this game. :-/

mediamogul

@obsidianspider

Have you checked to see if there's anything out of the ordinary at /opt/retropie/configs/nes/retroarch.cfg?