One Keyboard, 2 Players In EmulationStation

jthewitt

I'm running a Retropie 3B v4.8.

I have two Ultimarc Ultimate I/O boards in keyboard mode (one board has the ID2 firmware installed so it's recognized as a second unique device). I've got each board configured with different keys so there's no overlap. lsusb sees both Ultimarc boards.

I've gone into Retroarch and configured 4 players using those two boards which updates the ../all/retroarch.cfg file. I can get different MAME games (4 players) and NES games (2 players) to work with both boards by setting up the platform specific retroarch.cfg.

However, in EmulationStation, it only recognizes one keyboard so I can only setup inputs for 1 player (using the GUI configure inputs wizard in EmulationStation). Is there a way, like the platform specific retroarch.cfg files to setup all four players in EmulationStation (or some other way through the GUI)? I want any of the 4 player "stations" to be able to navigate the menus and select games, etc.

Thanks

mitu

The EmulationStation configuration for input handling is set in $HOME/.emulationstation/es_input.cfg. It has a different format than retroarch.cfg, but this is where input configuration is saved.

Unfortunately, what you need is not possible right now, because of two reasons:

the underlying input handling used by EmulationStation (SDL) doesn't handle more than 1 keyboard. That may not be an issue in itself if the keyboards are configured differently (as I assume you did for RetroArch by editing retroarch.cfg).
EmulationStation doesn't support binding more than 1 input to the same action in a single configuration profile. So you can't bind down to 2 keys in the Keyboard configuration profile.

jthewitt

Thanks mitu - I didn't know about the es_input.cfg file. That's what I was looking for. My inputs don't overlap between the two boards, so I thought I'd be able to edit that file manually and create something that allowed for more than one player to control ES UI, but I couldn't get it to work. Not a big deal - player one controls the ES UI. As far as I can tell, using four players across all the boards works in the retroarch.cfg files for each platform and that's what really matters. Thanks for your help.