Game launch kills start button

Val_Ainsley

Hello! I'm having a bit of a problem with my controls for my home arcade cab. I have a 2-player 12-button arcade control panel with a start and select for each player plus one hotkey button, and they're all wired up to a xin-mo usb encoder. ES recognizes my controls as 2 different gamepads, and the buttons and joysticks all work great. The problem, though, is that any time I try to boot up a game, the start button for the first controller configured in ES stops working. Only the most recently configured controller's start button work.

I know it’s not an issue with the buttons, and I doubt it’s an issue with the encoder. When I reconfigure the buttons, ES still reads the inputs just fine. I have no problem reconfiguring. It’s just that one start button always seems to basically shut off any time a game is launched. This leads me to believe that this is a software or firmware issue.

This issue is not specific to any one emulator, either. I have tried this with FBNeo, MAME, Mupen64+, PCSX Rearmed, and Flycast, and the start button shuts off every time.

What should I do here? I have looked through this forum and the retropie subreddit, but I haven’t found any threads with this issue for arcades. Can anyone help me out?

Details-
Pi Model or other hardware: Raspberry Pi 4 Model B 8GB
Power Supply used: Nintendo Switch USB-C Charger
RetroPie Version Used: 4.8.9
Built From: Raspberry Pi Imager
USB Devices connected: Xinmotek XM-10 Dual Player PC/PS3 Encoder
Controller used: xin-mo.com Xinmotek Controller
Attachment of config files: EmulationStation input config, Retroarch autoconfig
How to replicate the problem: Configure 2 xinmo gamepads, open game, press start on both controllers. The start button for the first controller that was configured will not work.

mitu

@Val_Ainsley said in Game launch kills start button:

Only the most recently configured controller's start button work.

I think the issue (quite common in this configuration scenarios) is that your start buttons are not wired similarly and they produce different input codes. Since both gamepads are named the same, they share the same configuration, both in ES and emulators. Thus, if a button (Start in your case) produces different inpus on P1 or P2, their configuration will be overwritted by the last configured gamepad (P1 pr P2).

So make sure the buttons/inputs are wired similarly and produce the same input code, then configure one of the gamepad once in EmulationStation and the configuration should apply to both P1/P2.

Val_Ainsley

@mitu Thank you so much! This fixed the problem. I was sure it wasn't a wiring issue, but I guess it goes to show how little I really know about computers, lol. Thanks for the help :)