Where are keyboard commands mapped in retroarch config?

[Jabberwocky]

I've been slogging on the newbie road of understanding retroarch and MAME 2003 keyboard mappings.

Somewhere along the way the ENTER/ESC/TAB keys on my USB keyboard stopped being mapped.

They also aren't working with the physical buttons mapped on the Picade itself, so I'm guessing that the mappings are wrong in the Retroarch config.

Without my having to blow my retroarch config out again (for probably like the 10th time) and rebuild it, can someone direct me to where the keyboard buttons get set in the retroarch.cfg or if there's a string that enables/disables the keyboard itself?

Thanks.

[mitu]

https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Keyboard-Controllers/#emulation-station-and-retroarch

[Jabberwocky]

Hi @mitu this is helpful, I had grep the retroarch.cfg for 'keyboard' but idiotically did not make it a case insensitive search so didn't find the 'Keyboard' config section.

I am now however more confused than ever.

I wanted to make these changes so that I could easily configure the button mappings in MAME games using the MAME menu as the retroarch menu for the button mappings is quite confusing to me.

After setting the keyboard mappings, I am able to use the "enter" key in MAME to select a button in my game I want to remap, however the MAME menu is not recognizing some of the button pushes coming from the Picade console.

Additionally after setting some of the buttons successfully (some of the buttons on the cabinet are being recognized just not others) now other buttons that I didn't even adjust no longer work. SELECT & START for example now don't work, I can't add quarters and start the game from the cabinet any longer.

I have seen videos where they demonstrate setting your buttons by using the keyboard to highlight the button you want to reconfigure and then pushing the button on the console and it makes it seem quite simple, but it doesn't seem to be working.

It seems as though once the mapping is down with the keyboard, the keyboard becomes the way MAME thinks I want to play the game.

Is there a step I am missing or is the preferred way to do this to map out what all the button numbers are in Retroarch and reconfigure the buttons for the game there instead?

Thanks.

[Jabberwocky]

Okay, so it seems as though what has happened is that changing the keyboard config in retroarch has basically broken the use of the onboard joystick and buttons that are connected to the Pimoroni hat that sits on top of the Pi4.

Again, this stuff is incredibly confusing... because inside of Retroarch when you are using the joystick and buttons it says that the device is "retropad" it says nothing about it being mapped to the keyboard.

Looking in Retroarch I can see now where all of my key mappings are busted and referencing the changes I made in the config file to remap KEYBOARD (not RETROPAD) config.