Bar Top with USB Hub
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I am making a Bartop console, using a Raspberry PI400 system and I have Retropi 4.7.1 installed. I have 2 player setup now with Joystick and 8 buttons. Everything works great!! I would like to have a USB hub on the front of the system to plug in other USB controllers to use as either substitute Player 1/2 or Player 3/4 or player 1/2/3/4. need to know if this is possible and what USB hub I should get to do all of this. Also, if I decide to cut back from 8 buttons to 6 buttons, what can I use the extra 4 leftover buttons for? Thank you all in advance!!
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@mike1889 I have a setup like that. It’s a Pi3B with a Controlblock for the arcade buttons. I used a USB male to female cable like this one:
https://www.amazon.de/MXtechnic-Verlängerung-Verlängerungskabel-Motorrad-Dashboard/dp/B01B4KYSZC/
I used Meleus joystick selection script to make the swapping between arcade controllers and SNES-like wired USB controllers work. https://github.com/meleu/RetroPie-joystick-selection
My arcade controllers are street fighter style 6 action button layouts with START and SELECT/COIN buttons so it’s the same amount of buttons as on the SNES pads.
If I plug in the gamepads they become player 1 and 2 and when I unplug them it defaults back to the arcade buttons. I think I got it to work as a 4 player setup as well but swapping between 2 and 4 players would involve going back in to the setup of the script.
The plugging and unplugging of controllers can only be done while in the game selction menu, not ingame or it will crash the system.
[EDIT] Please note that my solution is not a USB hub but a double male famele extension cable. Because my arcade buttons are connected via the Controlblock/pinout I have enough free port for this solution.
It’s quite some time since I set this up so I’m not sure if can help with more details but at least it’s doable, works for me.
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Thank you very much for the advise!! I will give this a try!! I am also going to use the extra 4 buttons for hardwired functions like maybe one button hotkey/save/load and maybe another popular function. Do you have any of these on yours? Thanks again!!
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I actually have a dedicated hotkey on the arcade controller. On the SNES pads I just use SELECT as hotkey. I haven’t had the time use the cabinet for some time now but at least I can’t remember having problems when swapping between the different configurations of buttons on the controllers..
In some cases using SELECT as a hotkey can interfere with the game controls but as far as I’m concerned the dedicated hotkey is not absolutely necessary. On the other hand I really wish I had put in two more action buttons on the arcade controllers. I now have Street Fighter style six button layouts but I wish they were eight buttons instead. They could be used as R1 and R2 on Playstation games. NeoGeo cabinets used to have four buttons in a row so having two rows of four buttons would mimic the NeoGeo controller better as I then could use one out of the two rows of buttons as originally intended. There’s probably also many other situations where more action buttons will allow for better configurations.
If you haven’t read this yet you really should, it’s a fantastic resource on arcade controllers:
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