Rotary Joystick Config

[hhcasey]

I'm running RetroPie on a Raspberry 3+ along with the Ultimarc I-pac Ultimate I/O configured for keyboard.
I also have Ultimarc's rotary joystick kit that I've converted my joysticks with.
I'm using 8 buttons per player with a 2 player setup.

The I-pac is running just fine.

I setup the rotary to be what I understand to be the defaults (i.e. Player 1 increase "[" and decrease "]" and Player 2 increase "/" and decrease "". I checked the functions by connecting the sticks to my laptop and notepad and they pass the characters correctly and just for fun, I edited a config file with the pie and the rotaries passed the correct characters".

And then the confusion. I'm using Ikari Warriors as my first game for this. My libretro core is lr-mame2010. I start the game, press tab to get to the setup menu, choose Input (this game) and scroll down. I was kind of expecting a -dial_device instead of positional analog but it looks like the default is Mouse X. When I choose Mouse X, or positional analog inc or positional analog dec, retroarch will not accept []/ or . Interestingly, while playing around with the game, I notice that the character is turning left and right when I press button 5 and 6. I double checked and that's what is the default.

I also manually added two lines in the retroarch-core-options.cfg to include :
mame2010-dial_device = "keyboard"
mame2010-positional_device = "keyboard"

What am I overlooking?

[MortalWombat]

@hhcasey you ever get an answer for this? I am quite new to the Pi (using a Pi4), RetroPie (running 4.7.3), and trying to get these old arcade ROMs to work (so far most of these games have been working out of the Arcade folder running lr-mame2003), but the controller mapping/configuration gets even more complicated, especially for these 8-way "rotary" joystick games (here's a good list below for anyone unfamiliar, but some of the ones I used to play/am trying to play again are shooters like Heavy Barrel, Forgotten Worlds, and Time Soldiers).
http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=28722.0

I'd heard of people actually buying/making customized rotary joysticks (https://www.reddit.com/r/MAME/comments/c751p3/rotary_joystick_for_heavy_barrel/ ), but I figure there's got to be a way to configure the controls.

I remember when I used to play these games on MAME on my desktop comp w/ no controller, there were buttons right next to one another on the keyboard (possibly "Z" and "X" but I don't remember) that'd cause you to rotate L or R, so I'd like to think that there's a way to configure one's controller to replicate these commands?? Just so new to the system as a whole that I wasn't sure which menu to go to, or how I'd configure things on my Logitech F310 (I have Forgotten Worlds as one of the games on the Capcom Classics Collection on my original XBox, but as it's been outta commission recently, unfortunately I'm not able to test it to see how its controls replicated this feature).

Anyway I'd been on here searching if this topic had been covered/resolved before when I came across your post; lemme know if you've figured it out, otherwise I may try making a new post. Thanks!!

[mitu]

@mortalwombat The poster hasn't been active since they posted this topic. I'd advise against necro-bumping old topics and just ask your question in the forum, referencing this topic (if it contains relevant info to your problem).

[MortalWombat]

@mitu thank you for chiming in, just been trying to do my research before posting so as not to create dupe posts here if at all possible; knowing this I'll try to rephrase and repost.