Dedicated home/exit button while retaining separate hotkey button (2021 edition)

[Denyou]

So I've been trying to research this for a while and have looked through various threads here and on reddit, however every post I've found is over 2+ years old and I'm hoping there has been some breakthroughs since then.

Ultimately, I am looking to have my arcade cabinet to have one key that exits back to EmulationStation (effectively replacing or acting as the Hotkey+Start button). However, I'd still like to also reserve a separate button to act as a hotkey button for using other functions when necessary. For reference, I am using one of these USB controller encoders.

I realize I can disable hotkeys or make the hotkey and exit button the same for gaining the dedicated exit button (editing the cfg file), but then I lose the hotkey functionality. Ultimately, not what I want.

As an aside, I've seen a few posts mentioning a "hardware" solution by effectively soldering the "hot" wire for the start and hotkey buttons to a single button, making pressing this button act as both the start and hotkey at the same time. I'm open to a soldering solution, but I don't see how this would solve the issue because wouldn't this idea also cause the start and hotkey buttons to also double up (meaning all 3 buttons will act as start+hokey)? If someone has and idea/diagram for making the "hardware" solution work with a bit more explanation I'd appreciate it. Previous threads (reddit) that mentioned this idea were all locked so I couldn't follow up there.

Thanks all.

[mitu]

You can use a similar solution to the one in this post, where the requirement was to have the Pause function being triggered without a hotkey.