Let's Talk Arcade Controls on a Pie!
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So I wanna add an arcade section to my pie setup. I know there is some emulation support on the pie for certain mame games. But my concern is how to handle the vastly different button layouts of the arcade cabinets vs the simple joy pad of the pie. Obviously, the NES or SNES is simple, as it's just a d-pad and a few buttons where all the games use the same layout.
But what do folks do with their setups for mame on a pie? How do you go about making sense of all the different button layouts for the various cabinets (with each one doing a different thing)? Is there a default that works for most? Seems like a huge mess/headache trying to config each individual game (and I have over 100 arcade titles I wanna add) How do other folks handle this?
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@alphabetapie It mainly just works - did you try any games yet?
When you first set up your controller in Emulation Station you saved an autoconfiguration for your joypad to bind your physical buttons to the RetroPad convention. Each core decides how to pass on those button presses to the game ROMs. For example, see the section on layout for the FinalBurn Neo core, and how 6 button inputs are mapped to the RetroPad buttons: https://retropie.org.uk/docs/lr-fbneo/
Because FBNeo tries to keep all controls mapped to the 4 face buttons of a RetroPad the button layout doesn't usually correspond very closely to the original arcade layouts, but it usually feels OK. If you don't like the controls in a particular game then you can set a remap in the core options in RGUI, and save it. You can even have different controller buttons map to the same game button and see which you find easiest to hit!
I think that if you're using a game pad it's natural to reverse the arcade controls because your thumb falls most easily over the right-most buttons of the game pad like how on proper arcade control your right hand index finger falls over the left-most (most important) button. Or, I'm over thinking it :D
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@alphabetapie the beauty of retropie and retroarch is that’s all done for you. you bind your pad once to the retropad layout (as prescribed in the docs) and all lr- cores (and several standalone emulators) should have sensible defaults. arcade is no different.
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I play arcade titles almost exclusively and I don't have a problem except for spinner/steering wheel games and light-gun games.
I use an arcade stick, four or six buttons (plus start and coin), and a trackball.
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By the way, MAME 2003-Plus has four different button layout presets for gamepads and arcade sticks. See Default RetroPad Layouts in the Libretro wiki for MAME 2003-Plus. They should cover most games' button layouts.
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