Button requirements on homebrew retropie controller

robsbots

Hey all.
I'm building a console for my nephew's and I'm running low on time. This is the build so far.

I have :-
Pi 4
Controls kit : https://amzn.eu/d/72mqxm4
Usb game controller module x 2
microswitch joystick x 2
buttons x 6 for player 1
buttons x 6 for player 2 (One off being measured in the shed)
coin button x 2 C1/C2
player 1/2 buttons P1/P2
4 Console control buttons. Start/Select/HK/???? Back maybe ?? I don't know. Could I have an "Escape game back to retropie menu" button ?

This is the layout.

C1        Start  Select   HotKey  ????          C2
------------------------------------------------------

J1    1  3  5         P1  P2           J2   1  3  5

        2  4  6                              2  4  6

All hardware is working,
What I need to know is once I put this together what buttons map to what. I planned on working though this once the unit is built, but I have a day to finish now and I need to get the the front panel art printed and don't really know what to label things.

I expect this to be used for console games mainly but would like an "Arcade" feel to it.
I'm a little confused with "start" "select" from the user interface and the player 1/2/credit buttons from mame setups. I'd like them to be separate.
When I was designing the box I envisaged a top row of buttons for controlling the console functions and then Coin1/2/P1/P2 + 6 buttons each "inside" games.

During initial setup of retropie asks for button mappings for start/select/rtrigger/lthumb etc.These don't really tally with my layout and not being a gamer I'm not really sure what makes sense. What would be a good starting point with my layout ?
I can then get on to mapping in retopie, then EmulationStation /mame configs if I understand the process correctly.

Is this reasonable ?

I'm more than happy on the command line and editing config files in linux.
Thanks for your input.

robsbots

@robsbots
Hey all.

I kinda' got the buttons working for the big day and the console was a hit (I lost my 'hot button' so had to pull the power to load a new game.
I've since probed a bit deeper and got a setup that's working pretty good. I've even started designing my own usb controller using a Pi Pico. I have some ideas for features not found in standard controllers but will assist with cabinet/console designs with the Raspberry Pi.

Is there any software/scripts to help debug controllers, maybe displaying mappings between retropie/emulation station/ etc and showing button presses and what the system thinks these are currently called with numbers/keyboard mappings etc.

Thanks.

Rob.

mitu

@robsbots said in Button requirements on homebrew retropie controller:

Is there any software/scripts to help debug controllers, maybe displaying mappings between retropie/emulation station/ etc and showing button presses and what the system thinks these are currently called with numbers/keyboard mappings etc.

jstest or evtest can be used to test how the OS is seeing your controller (i.e. event codes and types) - they should tell you how most of emulators and Linux programs will receive the raw events. There's a similar sdl2-jstest utility that helps to see how the SDL library sees the controller/inputs, useful to check for SDL based emulators or programs (like EmulationStation) will behave.

jstest should come by default with the RetroPie Pi image, evtest is in the similarly named package and can be installed with apt. sdl2-jstest is a source only install - see https://github.com/Grumbel/sdl-jstest.

robsbots

Hey @mitu.

Just what I was after. jstest is exactly what I wanted. As yet I haven't done anything with evtest or sdl2-jstest, but I've taken notes and they are now in the tool box for continued retro-pie adventures.

Again. Thanks very much for your help.

Rob