Can not exit emulator

[SelDraken]

I am new to retro pie and raspberry pie, but not new to emulators or computers for that matter.
However, I just got a raspberry pie 4, and installed retropie for raspberry 4
I did the update from the retropie menu

I am using all default, nothing custom, and a rock candy xbox 360 corded usb controller

When it came to configuring the controller, I was confused by 'hotkey' and like others i saw post, I assumed it needed to be unique and on my xbox controller, I set it to the round Xbox button in the center.

When I played a game, I had no way to exit... time to google, says 'hold hotkey + start' nothing. Then someone posted, leave hotkey blank, and you get option to set it to 'select' , so i did that, and told it yes to set the hotkey to select, still no exit when playing a game.

I saw another post where someone said they set the keyboard as a controller, and set the hotkey to F12, and start to Enter, and when holding F12 and Enter they could exit. So I tried this, and it didn't work, although, when in the emulator snes, it didnt detect my keys ASDW for movement, but only the Arrow Keys.

This makes me think the problem is with the emulator itself. Perhaps it is not exiting due to not recognizing the hot key? The emulator is reading the left and right triggers as some sort of select and start so does it even read the 'actual' select key I used as a hotkey?

All the articles I can find on this are over a year old, and either don't give any solution ever being found or give a solution as something I have tried but still doesn't work.

Any help with this is much appreciated, I would hate to think I wasted money on two raspberry pies, that I can't use for their intended purposes :(

Thanks.

[SelDraken]

@seldraken
I think I solved it, after spending literally all day, trying different things, and restarting my little pie countless times.

Apprently, the whole idea of 'hot key' + start is sort of confusing, because even though you set a 'start' key in your controller setup, each emulator has its own idea of a 'start' key, and even if you set your hotkey to 'select', the emulators have their own idea of 'select' key.

So it happens to be a combination of the two
You have to holdthe 'hot key' that you set in the controller setup,
and press the 'start' key that the EMULATOR thinks is the start key (which might not be the start key from the controller setup)

In my case, with the rock candy, I set the hot key to the 'select' key, and the start key to the 'start' key,
but in the two emulators I tried (NES, and SNES) the start key for them is the 'right trigger'

So to exit I had to hold the 'select' + 'right trigger'
'select' being the one I set up in configure controller, as the emulator's select is 'left trigger'

Hope this can help anyone as confused as I was.

[lostless]

@seldraken something is not right with your configuration. Each emulator configures itself based off your emulation station configure. So what ever you set start to there, retropie sets start to that button for all emulators. There is no what the emulator sees as start and select unless you’ve been messing with the controller configure. But even then, it doesn’t effect the original configure for hot keys.

[IanDaemon]

@lostless I think you're right. As I understand it... libretro emulators (lr-*) use whatever RetroArch tells it as far as button-mappings and RetroArch is using what EmulationStation tells it. Do I have that correct?

[lostless]

@iandaemon yes, that’s pretty much it. Emulation station writes a configure file for retro arch and other emulators. If you change a button in retro arch, say you like to use y and b as your a and b in Nes per say, and reconfigure, it doesn’t effect the hot keys. Those are still mapped to the original emulation station setup. So let’s say you move start to say, R1 in retro arch, start for the hot key will still be the original start you chose in emulation station.