Can't exit games using X-Arcade controller

Jerkamie

@BuZz sorry, I watched that video lastnight but it was so late I can't remember what I learned . I'll have to look tonight when I get home.

Jerkamie

@MikeDave I'll try that tonight but, I'd really like to get this running the way it was intended.

Jerkamie

@BuZz buzz there's 1 preprogrammed slot, which works great, but can't exit, I switched to slot 2 and programmed my own mapping with a keyboard. Still no exit.

BuZz

I need detailed information - what mappings etc - I cannot help without a detailed view of your configuration. Your replies are not giving me any information to work with.

Jerkamie

@BuZz okay well whatever mappings you program you still can't exit. It's not a problem with the mappings, it's a problem in the drivers with the drivers enabled, or with the drivers disabled, its a problem with the arcade stick, they won't send the key press start and select while pressed together. Hope this helps someone in the future, I'm going to try and return the xarcade stick.

Retropie should remove the drivers and remove any other documention claiming it's supported for the stick, ad it could lead to more people buying and returning the xarcade stick.

BuZz

I'm trying to help. I don't want to make any assumptions - that would be a bad way to debug the issue.

You are not being at all helpful.

If it is a start+select issue with the x-arcade hardware it might be because it is using them for something else (eg to switch some mode), or it could be a bug. But you can then just change the hotkey enable button to something else - which is a simple task.

Jerkamie

I've been thinking about the problem all day. I was reading about a built in feature of the xarcade, it's set up that when you press player 2 and the bumper button it sends it's own key buttons to exit Mame in windows the same combination is used for start (a player button for start, and the bumper on the side as select) . This could be interfering with the combo retropie uses for exiting a game?

BuZz

I have done some digging. According to http://blog.petrockblock.com/2014/06/01/xarcade2jstick/ Select + Start is mapped to TAB (Which may be the problem in Retroarch) when using the XArcade2JStick - but reading the comments it should be fine in keyboard mode without the driver. I suspect you haven't disabled the driver correctly as it should work (Other's have reported it working at least).

I would need to see your config from /home/pi/.emulationstation/es_input.cfg

Jerkamie

@BuZz hmm I went into the configuration, stopped the service, and removed it then rebooted my pi. I can get the configuration file tonight.

Jerkamie

@BuZz if start and select on the xarcade output tab, can't I just edit the configuration file to quit the emulator when tab is pressed?

BuZz

you can set tab as the exit button, but you would need to disable the hotkey enable button also. You will have problems on some libretro cores with that though as I think some use tab for the mame menu.

I would follow that youtube view and set it up as described. Or this one - https://github.com/scottnath/retropie-with-dual-x-arcades

Jerkamie

I re flashed retropie, and stayed away from the drivers this time. Got it all setup like it should be as a keyboard (what i tried to do lastnight for hours worked right the first time). Sorry I was so annoying buzz! It would be nice though to get the drivers fixed so we can use our sticks as axis's instead of key presses.

BuZz

@Jerkamie i will look at he driver code at some point. Glad you gave it working

dsstrainer

I assume this is fixed as I downloaded 4.0 back at the end of August and used the drivers and I can exit just fine in libcores. I only ran into a problem with Mame4all initially where it didn't like the select and start buttons I was using but just a quick button change in the Xarcade-to-GamepadDevice.cfg file fixed that. I've switched to all libretro cores now and I use the drivers flawlessly.

dsstrainer

I use my Tankstick with RetroPie 4.0 and the xarcade2Jstick driver flawlessly since day one. I never really understood (and still don't) the issue people are having with the select + start thing... but I think that's some issue with mame4all. I use all libretro emulators and they all work perfectly. I think the only thing i changed was the hotkey from the select/insert coin button to one of the extra 2 buttons under player 1.

But now that I've been building my own units and gotten more advanced, I've found a real issue. It's not so much with Xarcade2Jstick, but more with the limitations of retroarch and hotkey buttons. Basically, I was trying to set the following
p1: 8 buttons
p2: 8 buttons
admin: 4 buttons - dedicated Exit/Reset/Save/Load

But I found that RetroArch doesn't support dedicated joystick buttons for admin (which is beyond ridiculous)
So I would have to do Hotkey/Exit/Save/Load and put the reset button in the player buttons somewhere.
But that also means 2 buttons from P1 and 2 buttons from P2. But you can't use p2 buttons as hotkeys and you can't cross the gap with a hotkey button P1 and the Save button on P2.

So my only solution for both issues now is to rip out all the xarcade2jstick stuff and leave it as default keyboard emulation. Won't be fun but hopefully I can get it all working.

dsstrainer

But driver uninstall doesn't seem to work. disabled the service from retropie configuration and uninstalled. Rebooted 4 times now. But each time i come back into ES, it sees it as an "Xarcade-to-gamepad" device. Going to try a fresh install of RetroPie 4.1

dsstrainer

Ok fresh install and now my TS is now seen as a keyboard correctly
So I'm working on becoming an expert here with the Xarcade with/without driver scenarios here. I'll reference it as the "TankStick" or "TS" for name sake, but I'm actually just using Xarcades encoder boards in my own arcade cabs that I sell on etsy.

With Driver
Pros:

TS is seen as a gamepad by emulation station instead of a keyboard
TS Player1 and Player2 controls can be assigned separately through emulation station
After initial setup in ES, all libretro emulated games worked perfectly

Cons:

Player2 controllers cannot be used with hotkeys in RetroArch (this is a retroarch limitation, likely with all gamepad devices, not just TS). Makes 2 buttons pretty useless on P2
Seems the Select+Start combo causes some issues on some emulators. I simply changed the hotkey enable button to button 7, under player1 controls, instead of the left flipper and it's fine. I believe this was the issue @Jerkamie was seeing above. Simple fix.
Player 1 Left Paddle and Player 2 Right Paddle wouldn't work together for single player pinball games. So you would need to rewire it so that both side buttons were from the Joy 1 wiring harness. This is only something you'd see when wiring your own.
Limited to a single 2 player tankstick. If you want to follow guide for dual tanksticks (4 players), you can't use the driver. At least not for all 4. You could in theory use the driver for the first 2 players and the keyboard mapping for the other 2 players.

Without Driver
Pros:

TS is seen as a keyboard and the default is already mapped some certain keys. You can also change these if necessary
TS Player1 and Player2 controls can be assigned separately through emulation station
RetroArch seems to allow dedicated exit buttons (without hotkey) to be assigned to keyboards, but not to gamepads, so you can have a dedicated exit button (at least). Not sure yet about dedicated save/load/reset/menu buttons but I'll find out as that is what I'm attempting to have.

Cons:

Emulation Station only supports one keyboard device, so now you need to be sure to sync up your real keyboard and TS buttons to work together
Since Emulation Station only supports one keyboard, that means it only allows you to configure one player within the controls. So the only way to add Player2 controls to Retroarch is by manually editing the file to add them.

I've just started using the TS as a keyboard because I found out the limitations of the driver the hard way after cutting the holes in my next unit.

 ---------------------------------------------------------
 ||	  E  R	            1  2             S  L       ||
 ||							||
 ||							||
 ||	O	 L X Y		 O	  L X Y		||
 ||	|	R B A		 |	 R B A		||
 ||							||
 ||							||
 ----------------------------------------------------------
 ----------------------------------------------------------
 ||	       C			    C		||
 ----------------------------------------------------------
        E - Exit		S - Save State
        R - Reset Game		L - Load State
	C - Coin/Select (on front panel)

The idea was that "E" and "R" would be the 2 extra buttons from Player 1's side and "S" and "L" would be the 2 extra buttons from Player 2's side and I would disable the hotkey and just have dedicated buttons. But apparently this can't be done for the multiple reasons mentioned above.

So holes drilled already, my fallback was to change the Exit button to the Hotkey button and the reset button to the Exit button, requiring the hotkey to be held for Exit, Save, and Load. But due to the other issue with P2 controls not being allowed as hotkey buttons, I have to go with the TS as a keyboard option and hope for the best.

MikeDave

@dsstrainer This is awesome info. Thanks for taking the time to post it. I'm excited to hear how it all turns out for you.

dsstrainer

So I got the tankstick working as a keyboard fully now with 2 players and YES YOU CAN have dedicated hotkey buttons for Exit, Reset, Save, Load, etc when used this way. That seemed to be that question that nobody could answer properly. Some people said set the hotkey and the exit button to the same key, some people just wanted to know how to change which key was the hotkey shift, some said set it to nul but the button assignments didn't work. But I have finally proven to myself that you CAN have a dedicated buttons when your joystick emulates a keyboard. So that's a load off my mind.

The next thing is how to handle when you have a keyboard AND the tankstick which looks like a keyboard installed. Yes they both work, but since the tankstick default use things like num keys and brackets for controls, it made it a bit trickey to use a keyboard within Emulation station.

And further more in system menus like the RetroPie setup, you still need an Enter key which wasn't mapped.
Luckily though you can change the mode of these to change key mapping. So I worked on what should be a more functional mapping last night. I haven't programmed it yet (waiting for usb to ps/2 adapter for keyboard) but this should hopefully fix the need for the enter button and make ES navigation with keyboard (when necessary) much easier.

idea1

This will give me the normal control buttons like Enter and arrow keys. I might change the backtick to esc if allowed and maybe the End to Space. This will then also give me more usable key commands in system menus for selection and basic modification.

The goal here is that these units are for customers and they will only have a joypanel to control their system. So I will remove things some menus and such so that they cannot screw up their system, but when I want to help and connect a keyboard to get additional features, I need those features to be accessible and intuitive to me. I don't want to have to hit the semi-colon key to scroll down, etc.

So I'll post back after I make the key send changes. But so far, so good.

dsstrainer

So it looks like the new versions of the Tankstick and xarcade encode boards use a diff default layout now which is better, but wasn't perfect. Luckily you can reprogram it so I think I am pretty close to perfect. ES was designed around an NES gamepad but since I'm using an arcade, the concept of "start" and "a/b" don't really apply, so I needed to setup more intuitive keys, and they had to work across all 3 environments: ES, Retroarch, System Level menus (RetroPie Setup)

Requirements:
Joy panel needs to work in 3 places

System level
u/d/l/r, Enter, Esc, Space for menu select
Emulation Station
u/d/l/r, Enter (A), Esc (B), Tab (Start), Ctrl (Select)
Retroarch
u/d/l/r, Enter (P1 start), Esc (Exit), 18 other buttons and P2 u/d/l/r can be arbitrary

So I reprogrammed the encoder to send the primary control keys needed for System level: Enter, Esc, Tab, Ctrl, Space, u/d/l/r as my base for P1. I've mapped the P1 start button to "Enter" key and in ES mapped it to the "A" button because I wanted to keep it common across all 3 that P1 start button "starts/enters/goes" and the Esc button will "exit/go back" in all systems. The ES "start" menu is now mapped to tab which is more of a menu key and also the reset button within retroarch.

When you save the ES config though, it will try to apply those settings to retroarch, but the "A" button then would be the P1 start so that wasn't going to work, so I manually edited the main retroarch.cfg file to make more sense for that alone.

Now I have everything working perfectly across the 3 environments with intuitive controls.