Is it Better to just Reinstall RetroPie? (Trackball works, but not with RetroPie)

stoney66

Have you tried advmame yet? I gave up on mame2003 for this reason and my trackball (via mini-pac) worked out of the gate with advmame.

Tango

@stoney66 said in Is it Better to just Reinstall RetroPie? (Trackball works, but not with RetroPie):

Have you tried advmame yet? I gave up on mame2003 for this reason and my trackball (via mini-pac) worked out of the gate with advmame.

That's on my list to try.

I know I have read up on how to install AdvanceMame on RetroPie. Is the configuration hard? I did read some comments about issues with configuration.

I'm interested in hearing any more about your experienced with it.

Do you have a spinner? Are you able to use the trackball or spinner in various games, as needed?

stoney66

na the config is easy, I was also able to setup volume/pause/menu with hotkeys much easier with advmame as well. It uses the .106 romset but I've noticed quite a lot of games are the same as the .78 romset (e.g. millipede and donkey kong are the same rom).

I don't have a spinner but the trackball works great in all the games I play (centipede, millipede, golden tee, bowling games etc).

mtm671

@Tango if you have a keyboard with a Touchpad or a mouse hooked up It disables the trackball.

Tango

@mtm671 said in Is it Better to just Reinstall RetroPie? (Trackball works, but not with RetroPie):

@Tango if you have a keyboard with a Touchpad or a mouse hooked up It disables the trackball.

That, at least under mame-lr2003, would coincide with my experience - but it doesn't seem to disable the spinner as well.

I'm working with an Emulator Edition Plus from Rec Room Masters. There's 3 input modes on that. (I don't know if that's something they programmed in or if it's from UltraMarc, who makse the Mini PACs they use.) Under Keyboard Input mode, I could get the spinner working without doing a thing - just never could get the trackball to work, but, as I mentioned, under Mame, the trackball input (/dev/input/mouse0) was always ignored by mame-lr2003.

That also seems to be what's happening under mame-lr2003 with the D Input mode, too.

I'm waiting to get .106 ROMs for advmame now. (Wow! Huge file! And I can't find it as one single file anywhere!)

Tango

@stoney66 said in Is it Better to just Reinstall RetroPie? (Trackball works, but not with RetroPie):

na the config is easy, I was also able to setup volume/pause/menu with hotkeys much easier with advmame as well. It uses the .106 romset but I've noticed quite a lot of games are the same as the .78 romset (e.g. millipede and donkey kong are the same rom).

I don't have a spinner but the trackball works great in all the games I play (centipede, millipede, golden tee, bowling games etc).

Thanks! I've already installed the latest version of advmame on my Pi using the configuration menu. (Installed from source, which took 45-60 minutes.) As I mentioned in my other response, getting the ROMs is, as always, a pain, but downloading them is being a major pain on this.

So once I have the full set, I'll be trying advmame and reporting what works.

The more I look over the forum here and other pages, the less I'm sure anyone is getting their trackball to work under mame-lr2003.

Jezza

@Tango I have a Ultimarc trackball using zero delay usb encoder and it is working under Ir-mame2003

Tango

I just hate this.

Well, I half like it.

I had worked with different settings for the trackball, like using 0 or 1 for the index and nothing happened. It was not working.

For several reasons, I pulled my Pi out of my machine and took it back home, thinking I might re-install, in case I had messed up a setting somewhere that I didn't know I had changed. Didn't have time, relatives were coming over, so I took it back down to the guest house and plugged it in so we could play games while we had visitors. The trackball, as best I remember, was not working in Centipede.

That evening, after people had gone to bed, I installed AdvanceMame by using the RetroPi menu and adding the current version of AdvMame from source. Took about an hour, then it was done. I didn't have time to test it and, in the meanwhile, was working on dealing with getting 0.106 ROMs.

Went down there the next day (the machine is now in the guest house) and didn't do a thing. I looked over and one relative was playing Missile Command.

The trackball was super-slow, but it was working. I tested it in Centipede. It worked fine.

So now the trackball is working, but the spinner isn't.

And what's getting to me is I do NOT know what I did to make it work! It's as if just installing AdvMame from source somehow made the trackball work in Mame-lr2003, too.

As to the spinner - I held down a button during runcommand, when it was launching Tempest. I used the option to make a special retroarch.cfg file just for that Tempest ROM. I added input_player1_mouse_index='1', saved, and exited out of that menu. (Trackball is mouse0.) It made no difference when I ran Tempest.

Now that AdvMame is installed and I have the 0.106 ROMs, when I can get down to the guest house tomorrow, I'll see how that works.

When I'm done with all this, I want to write up specific instructions on what made everything on this controller work properly. (That's part of the reason I'm frustrated that the trackball just started working and I can't be sure why.)

Tango

@Jezza said in Is it Better to just Reinstall RetroPie? (Trackball works, but not with RetroPie):

@Tango I have a Ultimarc trackball using zero delay usb encoder and it is working under Ir-mame2003

Thank you!

See what I just posted - suddenly mine is working. Spinner isn't, but the trackball is.

Jezza

trackball settings.jpg

Have you altered these settings in the
TAB menu to make it move faster?

Yeah I see your frustration. I did so many things before mine worked and I wonder if some of those things didn't need to be done.

As for the spinner I have no idea

Tango

@Jezza said in Is it Better to just Reinstall RetroPie? (Trackball works, but not with RetroPie):

Have you altered these settings in the
TAB menu to make it move faster?

Thanks - believe it or not, I was thinking of that when I was up here, at the computer and forgot to try it when I was in the barn with the machine. I would hope there might be a way to change that in the config for individual ROMs or do something else to change the tracking without having to change it with the menu every time I play a game.

Yeah I see your frustration. I did so many things before mine worked and I wonder if some of those things didn't need to be done.

Thanks. What puzzles me is how it wasn't working and I stopped working on it, and after disconnecting and reconnecting the Pi, it worked. It just doesn't make sense. On the other hand, when I re-installed RetroPie by putting in a new micro-SD RAM card (with a new RetroPie image on it), and the trackball worked for Mame-Libretro from the start. Granted, I was still using the ROMs I had put on the USB drive, but there was nothing but ROM images over in that area.

I would wonder if there were a bad connection, but everything was working and had been tested, so the real question is, "Why wasn't it working when I had done everything I should do?"

As for the spinner I have no idea

I'm working on that. I'm researching now and I'll be posting about it when I can say, "This is how it works." (But, of course, before that, I might be asking a lot of questions about it!)

The other thing I'm going to do is use the utilities from UltraMarc to change a few buttons on the controller. When I finish with my customizations, I'm going to put clear posts about exactly how I got everything to work.

sovereign120

@Tango Do you have anything else connected to your Pi that's being recognized as a mouse? For the longest time I couldn't understand why my trackball worked perfectly until I tried to play a game in Mame. Turns out the keyboard I was using, which has a touchpad attached, was confusing the Pi. If you do have something else attached to your Pi that the system sees as a mouse, unplug it and see what happens.

Tango

@sovereign120

@sovereign120 said in Is it Better to just Reinstall RetroPie? (Trackball works, but not with RetroPie):

@Tango Do you have anything else connected to your Pi that's being recognized as a mouse?

Originally I had a USB dongle that was a receiver for a wireless keyboard and mouse. Even if there was no mouse or the mouse was off, it would still show up as one. But I unplugged that and put in a normal USB keyboard a few days ago AND rebooted. If I had not rebooted, it would make sense that the wireless mouse had not gone away. I wonder if I needed to completely power down or something. But once I pulled that dongle off, the mouse count went from 3 to 2. (Trackball and spinner.)

For the longest time I couldn't understand why my trackball worked perfectly until I tried to play a game in Mame. Turns out the keyboard I was using, which has a touchpad attached, was confusing the Pi. If you do have something else attached to your Pi that the system sees as a mouse, unplug it and see what happens.

I have heard that in the input mode I have my controller set for now, that it's tough to use the trackball and spinner, but, more and more, I'm finding that I've been reaching beyond what their tech support can tell me.

Jezza

From my experience the TAB menu saves for individual roms without even selecting a save

The TAB menu is sooo awesome and makes everything MAME so much easier to configure than other emulators which don't have it

sovereign120

@Tango If you disconnected the spinner, do you know if the trackball would work then? I understand that it SHOULD work regardless, but if it does work in Mame with no other mouse connected then that would confirm a configuration error (or more specifically an "order" error/bug).

Is your Pi a Pi4? That's what I've narrowed down my issue to. There's some kind of bug in Retropie relating to the Pi4 that disregards what ever input order you yourself specifically set. I'm trying to have a trackball, keyboard with mouse, steering wheel and Unimark gun all connected, but I can't get them in the order. It shows the order I want in the settings, but Mame doesn't seem to care, lol. I didn't have this issue with the 3b+.

EDIT: I probably shouldn't say "a bug in Retropie" because it might be retroarch (using 1.8.4) or some other software issue.

mitu

@sovereign120 said in Is it Better to just Reinstall RetroPie? (Trackball works, but not with RetroPie):

EDIT: I probably shouldn't say "a bug in Retropie" because it might be retroarch (using 1.8.4) or some other software issue.

You can update your 3B+ installation for RetroArch - as long as it's Raspbian Stretch based - and test this theory. Version 1.8.4 for RetroArch is not a Pi4 only update.

Tango

I got some controls working with AdvMame. I need to go through and get a few pages on the AdvMame configuration settings, since I wasn't sure what to use to specify controls for the trackball or spinner. I also had a problem because my "Coin One" button pauses the game no matter what. This leads to funky issues. For instance, on one game, I kept trying to put in a coin by pressing that button and it just paused the game. On another game, it would add a coin to the count, but also pause the game until I pressed it again.

I also found that AdvMame can read a keyboard as if it's two controllers. Since I can change my controller from "B Input Mode" to "Keyboard Mode" (I'm guessing "B" means "Button," but I don't know.) From what I can see, just reading the TAB menu on AdvMame, I might have success using Keyboard mode and letting the keyboard act like two controllers.

That also raises another question I'm going to have to spend time searching for: Mame-Libretro(2003) vs. AdvMame. Do I keep both on the system? I'm not sure if they'll both work consistently with the controller in one mode. AdvMame seems to work better, including using sound sample files easily, and the ROM set that works with AdvMame has more games in it. But that's a whole other issue to explore. Ideally I'd like to get my controller working in Keyboard and B Mode in both AdvMame and Mame-Libretro, but if I can get it to do everything in one form, I'll call it a day.