Help with configuration

[bucktaylor100]

Need some help with customizing or configuring my new arcade system. I bought a retro arcade system from Microcenter and need some help with it. Eventually I'm going to give this as a present to an autistic kid but I need to have it configured so it's as easy as possible for him to use. He's mainly going to use this to play old arcade games like Pacman and Galaga etc... It's got a xin-mo controller, 2 joysticks and 20 buttons. There are 6 buttons next to each joysick, 2 on top of each joystick and 4 on a bottom control panel. I found there was an issue with the xin-mo controller and added something to the cmdline.txt file so it'd recognize both controllers. When it asked me to configure the controllers I had no idea how they should be configured and what the intent of each of the buttons was supposed to be so I did something and got past it. So I put a bunch of roms into the arcade folder of a thumb drive I had and after I rebooted it asked me to pick an emulator. I went with lr-mame2003. I'm not sure if that was the best one or not. After rebooting I selected arcade and it showed the 4000+ games. I found pacman and got it to work but the controls were all messed up. I couldn't go down and I couldn't figure out how to exit the game (I tried every button). Also, I was wondering if there was a favorites or something? It took me forever to scroll down to pacman. I know I could just put the games he wants on there but his older brother will be playing it as well and he likes a lot of the other games. Also, I'm not getting any sound. There are 2 speakers plugged into an amp and the amp is plugged into the pi.

So to summarize:

1. What's the best way to configure the controls for arcade games
2. What's the best mame type emulator
3. Is there a way to have a favorites section or a simple way to get to a specific game without scrolling for 10 minutes.
4. How do you shut this down easily? Can I configure a button to do a shut down?
5. How do I configure the audio? Amp is on and plugged into pi. Amp has volume turned way up and I plugged a phone into the amp and it played so I know it's all wired correctly.

If this was a windows based system I could have this all configured in a few minutes but unfortunately it's just not that easy with Linux.

[mitu]

@bucktaylor100 said in Help with configuration:

What's the best way to configure the controls for arcade games

Arcade games can have different button layouts, so the emulator tries its best to map a regular RetroPad to the emulated system. Usually the D-Pad is mapped to the joystick, Start is mapped to P1 Start, Select is Coin, A/B/X/Y/L/R are mapped to the panel buttons.
You can customize these per-core or per-game through the RetroArch configuration menus - https://retropie.org.uk/docs/RetroArch-Configuration/.

What's the best mame type emulator

Start here.

Is there a way to have a favorites section or a simple way to get to a specific game without scrolling for 10 minutes.

Yes, you can press Y to toggle the Favorite flag in a game and you can enable the Favorite global collection, which will show as a separate system in the Emulationstation list of system.

How do you shut this down easily? Can I configure a button to do a shut down?

Yes, you can configure a button.

How do I configure the audio? Amp is on and plugged into pi. Amp has volume turned way up and I plugged a phone into the amp and it played so I know it's all wired correctly.

Use the Audio menu in RetroPie and choose the analog jack output as default.

If this was a windows based system I could have this all configured in a few minutes but unfortunately it's just not that easy with Linux.

Sure, just install Windows on the Raspberry PI and you're good to go :).