What is Retropie doing different with controllers compare to stock Raspbian?

RedMarsBlueMoon

Hello!

I'm trying to figure out why the program I'm working on has mine and others' XBox controllers breaking their mappings.
The program is using SDL2 for controllers. Nothing else and no custom drivers etc.

It's all working fine on the official Raspian OS image installs. But I'm having these problems on the Retropie sd cards.

So is Retropie doing something custom that could change how the controllers are handled even on the Raspberry Desktop?

with xpad, udev or anything else like that?

I'd love to know why so I could get 'my' program and Retropie play nice together.

Cheers
Fred

mitu

What exactly doesn't work or works differently than stock Raspbian ? Do you have a link to your program/source ?

For Xbox controllers, there's the custom xpad driver that is configured with the triggers_to_buttons parameter, so the shoulder triggers (LT/RT) are mapped to buttons instead of axis. Did you try to uninstall the xpad driver and re-test ?

For SDL2, RetroPie uses its own SDL2 version, with a few specific patches, but none of them affecting Xbox controllers or the input system directly.

RedMarsBlueMoon

@mitu
Yes it turns out that the custom Retropie xpad driver was the culprit. I was pointed to this issue thread here, https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/issues/3379

I tried uninstalling and once again my XBox One controller worked fine with the program im working on (Chiaki)!

I'm still waiting to hear if that solves my user's similar issue as well.

Thanks!