Retropie randomly switches emulator in emulation station...

JoseyWales

I have this weird issue in retropie, I'll be browsing roms and then it randomly switches to a different system/emu. Say i'm browsing SNES roms it will randomly switch to the retropie menu or atari emu as if I pressed one of the arrow keys on my controller. Happens often even if i'm not touching any controller. Any ideas on how to solve? I'm using buffalo snes usb controllers.

backstander

@JoseyWales

I also had the same rare & random issue of EmulationStation jumping to another emulator when browsing my games but if you disabled Quick System Select from EmulationStation's UI menu, it will never happen again. The only down side is you can't press left and right to quickly switch video game systems when your viewing the games from the current video game system. You'll just need to back out to the list of video game systems. Did that make any sense?

Main Menu -> UI Settings -> Quick System Select = Off

Another thing you can do is change the "Dead Zone" for that controller but I only know how to do that with the Xbox 360 controllers and I'm not really sure if this will help!

sudo nano /etc/rc.local

xboxdrv --trigger-as-button --id 0 --led 2 --deadzone 4000 --silent & sleep 1

or something like that!

Also it could just be a bad controller with one of the dpad buttons are sticky. If someone spelt some coke in there then you'll have to take it apart and clean it.

caver01

@JoseyWales I can confirm what @backstander is saying even for a system like mine that uses micro-switched arcade joysticks on a keyboard controller. For me, if I have my actuator setup to make my joystick a sensitive 8-way, it is all too easy to accidentally slip a left or a right signal while holding the joystick down to scroll through ROMs. With a keyboard controller, there's no dead space to configure. Any dead space is physical. Of course, I could hear the click of my joystick whenever I engaged left or right and produced the effect you described.

My solution was to turn of Quick System Select. It's not a bad sacrifice. Guests that I teach how to navigate in Emulation Station will be less prone to accidentally switch Emulators. It can really help you int he long run to show new users that they need to back out of one emulator if they want to select ROMs in another.

JoseyWales

I've had the controllers just laying on the floor and it still just jumps around. There shouldn't be any dead zone with those controllers as their just standard game pads, no joy. I changed the setting and the problem is gone though. It might be a bug or crappy controllers, who knows. Thanks for the help!

edmaul69

@JoseyWales it is a linux issue and this guy made a fix for it. http://www.raphnet-tech.com/support/retropie/index.php

caver01

@edmaul69 Wow. That's just amazing someone figured it out and wrote a patch. Shouldn't something like this get back to the foundation or something so the raspian distro gets updated at some point? Seems like everyone should benefit from this insight without needing to compile your own kernel.

edmaul69

@caver01 yeah i have posted this here many times as i can confirm it works. He has probably submitted it to be fixed in linux but if it ever makes it to retropie i dunno.

BuZz

I emailed and asked if it had been submitted upstream and got no reply - I have found no reference to it either so I suspect it hasn't. It really needs to be fed to upstream kernel development.

JoseyWales

@edmaul69 , Thanks for that. At least there is some solution, maybe when I get more comfortable with linux and retropie i'll compile the kernel.