Some of my buttons register as two different buttons in MAME

CtotheVizza

I'm running retropie 4.5.1 on my Rasp Pi 3 B+
I currently have a mish-mosh controller box I made for a friend as a gift. It contains two different encoders running one joystick and 16 buttons. They register as Dragonrise generic N64's. When I runs jstest every buttons responds the way it should: I press button 1 it says button 1, I press button 3 it registers as button 3. However, in MAME I have noticed that my button 3 is registering as button 3 AND button 2. When I go to assign button 3 to a game (or just as the uber input for all MAME games) and press it the response shows Button 2 and Button 3 as being pressed. I posted a pic/question on reddit at:
https://www.reddit.com/r/RetroPie/comments/ecglqm/why_is_my_3rd_button_registering_as_button_two/
but got no replies. I am kinda clueless as to what I need to dive into- not sure if this is a hardware or software thing. Any help as usual is greatly appreciated.

CtotheVizza

here's what it looks like (ps check out my dope overlay)

mitu

The MAME input mapping is not replacing your Button2 with Button3, but merely adds Button3 to the existing mapping (which contains Button2) - it's additive. I don't think it's taking 2 inputs (B2 + B3) for a button press, but just adds one of them to the existing mapping.
To clear the mapping completely for an input, you'll need to press ESC twice when that input is selected, then try again re-mapping it.

CtotheVizza

@mitu That's not what's happening- I can choose a button that has "none" assigned, hit my third button and it registers as the 2nd and the third at the same time. It's not like "Left" in the pic above which has an either/or quality to it. For "P2 Button 1" when I pressed just my third button it registered as the 2nd and the third- "RetroPad1 B (the 2nd button) RetroPad1Y"

mitu

I see, so it's not as simple as I thought. I'd say this is a hardware thing, since all MAME does is get the button press and registering it - so I'd double check if there are no conflicts on that fronts. Looks like you've already used jstest to see how the buttons respond - so are you sure it's not a hw thing ?

EDIT: just to rule out any interference from RetroArch, can you try and do the same mapping in advmame ? (another arcade emulator, slightly newer MAME version).

CtotheVizza

@mitu I will give advmame a try- leaning towards hardware issue- cheap parts = cheap results I'm afraid.

CtotheVizza

@mitu I'm installing advmame as I type. In the meanwhile I hooked the controller box to my pc and ran it on MameUI0.198. It worked fine and registered the third button as only the third button. I'll post what's up in advmame once I get it running.

CtotheVizza

@mitu Everything works flawlessly in advmame so I'm clueless. I'll probably just move the roms to run off of that emulator.

CtotheVizza

@mitu Sooooo, I can use all the buttons properly mapped accordingly in Advmame but I lose all my custom bezels and what not plus I can't play a bunch of games like X-men vs Street Fighter- I can't bring up the retroarch menu with hotkeys etc.
I don't know what to do. I'm hoping for a solution to my mame2003 button issue. In the meantime I'm going through game by game and switching the 3+ button games to AdvMame so they'll play correctly. If you think of anything let me know. Thanks for all your help- you've helped me before as well on this project and it is most appreciated!

mitu

@CtotheVizza said in Some of my buttons register as two different buttons in MAME:

I can't bring up the retroarch menu with hotkeys etc.

Advmame is not a RetroArch based emulator, so there's no GUI - you just use TAB to bring up the menu. As for the bezels, MAME has a different kind of bezels (overlays) than the ones supported by RetroArch.

For the ROMs part, make sure you use the right ROMset version - Advmame is using the MAME 0.106 version - https://retropie.org.uk/docs/MAME/#advancemame-3.

CtotheVizza

Thanks, yeah unfortunately I've discovered all the different nuances between the two emulators. The bezel/overlay isn't a complete deal-breaker for me but it's made me change my thinking. As a whole I'm sticking with the Retroarch/Mame2003 unless it has three or more buttons and then it's off to Advmame-. I'm going to scour over my retroarch.cfg again also but it seems more like a Retroarch quirk than anything I've typed. Either way as long as my friend can play the games using the buttons needed I don't care how fancy it's presented.

grant2258

There was a problem with mame2003 and plus that required the old mame2003/cfg (mame input files files need to be deleted). There are other options if that doent work for you. The only other time ive seen this is on a controller like an ipac thats a keyboard encoder. In this case you change the input type to keyboard only or press the game focus mode button.

RedFarmer

I know this topic is really old but i had the same problem myself and solved it. I noticed that the button mappings in RetroArch interfered with MAME 2010's mappings. One button could mean one thing in RetroArch but another in MAME so RetroArch would say to MAME something like - Hey! We also want to press this button!

What i did was that i blanked out the button mappings in RetroArch so they're seen as ---. After this my MAME mappings worked straight away. Then saved it as a content (game) specific configuration.