Joystick mapping doesn't work in emulators

[paulslocum]

I need to use a joystick upside down. When I map the joystick and buttons in Emulation Station, everything works in the menus as expected, but in all the emulators/games the buttons work as expected while the joystick is inverted. No matter how I map the joystick it always comes out right side up (the opposite of what I want) in the emulators.

Why are the emulators ignoring the set mappings of the joystick but not the buttons? Somebody on Reddit pointed out that I can work around it by configuring each emulator's controls manually, but I'm wondering why this is happening and if it's a bug I should report? And I'd ideally like a way to configure all the emulator controls at once rather than having to set each one whenever I switch joysticks.

Using Retorpie 4.5.1 on Raspberry Pi 3 w/ official 2.5A supply. Burned SD card straight from current official Retropie image. Using a generic digital-only USB arcade joystick with 10 buttons.

[mitu]

A joystick is not similar to a button, in the sense that it's represented in the RetroArch configs just as an axis input type and the direction is specified with - or +. So Emulationstation assigns the axis to the joystick and adds +/- in 'natural' order, without consulting what you've chosen as Up/Down or Left/Right.

TL;DR - you either correctly install the joystick or you modify the RetroArch's configuration file - generated by Emulationstation - and invert the directions. You can find the configuration file in /opt/retropie/configs/all/retroarch-joypads, in a .cfg file named after your gamepad.

[paulslocum]

Thanks, I'll try that. It sounds like it is basically a bug since it should automatically invert an axis if I map the controls reversed. Some people want to flip joysticks around and use them left-handed, so the software shouldn't really assume a "correct" orientation.