Issues with my controllers

[The_Comedian]

Hello everyone, I'm having issues with the arcade joystick and buttons on now the 3rd arcade cabinet that I have built. I've never run into this issue before on either one of the other builds, the joysticks for this one that I got are slightly different but they're still popping up with the same name as the ones that I have in my other two builds, dragon rise inc.
Unfortunately when I went to purchase the joysticks for this arcade build The original ones were no longer being sold on Amazon.

So this is the issue I'm having, I started up retropie after writing the image It does a typical thing where it asks me to configure the input I go ahead and do that and It's working perfectly fine. I can figure the second player input And it's working perfectly fine as well. I boot into a game and the first player controller is working fine The second player the joystick controls are reversed and the buttons are not set up how I set them up. At this point I use the hotkey to get into retroarch I reconfigure the bindings for controller one and controller 2, I saved the configuration, exit go back into the game everything is fine. I come out of the game and now all of my controls on my main menu where my games are, I believe this screen is called emulation station if I'm not mistaken, All of my controls are messed up now my first player controls are backwards second player controls are normal with the joystick but the buttons are not configured correctly. Then I go back and reconfigure it And now it's not showing my gamepad as being Gamepad 1, it'll say gamepad 11 or gamepad 8, it'll be random every time I do this no matter how many times I've reset it And this goes for both of the controllers after I exit a game and try to reconfigure the button since they're all messed up every time I come out. I even tried just keeping one of them plugged in after resetting all the control options and rebooting. I can figure the inputs once it starts up for the first player controls go into the game the controls are backwards and the buttons are not what I mapped to them. I went back into retroarch did the bindings the games working perfectly fine, I exit the game and now not a single button is working or the joystick on the player one controls with the player two controls unplugged. I have never run into an issue with the previous two builds I did and I do not understand why this is happening on this arcade everything is exactly the same as the other two.
I'm hoping somebody can help me figure this out because this has been two days of me doing searches left and right and I cannot for the life of me figure out why this issue is occurring.

[The_Comedian]

@The_Comedian

Just wanted to add this as well, I followed these instructions
Start a game of the system you want to remap the buttons
Invoke RGUI (Hotkey+X with player 1)
Go to Quick Menu and then Controls
Configure the buttons the way you want
Select Save Core Remap File
OR, if you want to save this remapping for the current game only, select Save Game Remap File

And as I mentioned when I exit the game my controllers are completely messed up after doing this and I have to reconfigure them back in emulation station. I go back into the game and The buttons that I binded in retroarch are not saved. Again never had this issue with any of the other two arcades I built.

[mitu]

You haven't added any info about your setup, as asked in https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/3/read-this-first.

My guess is that your buttons are wired differently for P1 and P2 and configuring P2 messes up the P1 controls, but you don't see this until EmulationStation re-reads the controller configuration - which happens after a game is finished or at start-up.

Since the controllers for P1 and P2 are named the same (DragonRise.. etc), they share the same configuration. When you configure P2, you're overwriting the P1 configuration. If buttons for P2 are wired differently than P1, then the P2 configuration will not work correctly for P1, hence why they appear messed up. Make sure that joysticks are also using the same orientation and you haven't different rotation (so that P2 Down is actually P1 Up).

Wire both players identically and then configure only the controls for P1, the configuration will have to work for P2 - in EmulationStation and games.

[The_Comedian]

@mitu My apologies for not reading through that read first post. Nevertheless the problem was exactly what you said. I made sure that everything on the back of those little controller boards was plugged in exactly the same on both sides now the only problem is the joystick orientation has to be flipped around because it is reading backwards should be good. Thank you for your help I appreciate it.