Player 2 start with 1 Controller

NZSPY007

Hi All, My first post on here details hope some one can help. My setup as follows

Pi Model or other hardware: 4 B 8gb
Power Supply used: Official PI
RetroPie Version Used: 4.6.5
Built From: Official RetroPie Image (retropie-buster-4.6-rpi4)
USB Devices connected:HP USB Keyboard
Controller used:DragonRise USB
Emulator: FBA

I have been converting a iCade cabinet into a RetroPie setup. Have removed the iCade Bluetooth and replaced with a DragonRise USB encoder. Everything is working ok, except for 1 minor thing that is really bugging me and I can't seem to find the answer anywhere. Maybe this should be a retroarch question rather than RetroPie.

I have a keyboard attached to help with config and testing etc, but don't want that to be part of the finished product etc.

For my finished build I want to have just the 1 controller and be able to map one of the buttons on that controller to start 2 player alternating arcade games like Donkey Kong, Pacman, space Invaders etc. But there doesn't seem to be a way of mapping a button to be player 2 start. If I plug in a second controller, the start button on that starts a 2 player game, but I don't really want to have waste a whole encoder just for 1 button ? with mame2003 I can press tab on the keyboard and access the standard MAME menu and then map the controls by pressing the required buttons I want etc. But prefer the FBA emulation over Mame2003. But with FBA I can only access the retroarch controls menu and I can't work out how to get player 2 start to be on joystick 1. Is this a limitation of using FBA for these type of games ? Will I have to use one of the "mame" cores for these games ?

Hopefully someone has encountered this issue and has a workaround

Thanks in advance
Simon

mitu

@NZSPY007 said in Player 2 start with 1 Controller:

But there doesn't seem to be a way of mapping a button to be player 2 start.

That's a RetroArch's limitation, you can't split one - physical - controller over multiple RetroPads (P1/P2). It works when you're using a keyboard - you can bind keys from 1 keyboard to multiple players, but not when using a gamepad.
FBNeo doesn't have the additional input configuration menu that the Mame libretro cores have (few cores have that), so your option is to either use Mame for arcade emulation or add an additional controller. Alternatively, if the DragonRise encoder supports it, you can configure it to act as a keyboard and map the keys via retroarch.cfg for FBNeo.

NZSPY007

Hi Mitu, Thanks for confirming that. I'll move the effected games to use a different Emulator. Cheers Simon