Number/value of my buttons when configuring controls for the Emulators?

[SteffenMB]

Hi everybody

I am about to install Retropie on my Raspberry 3 and I have the Xin Mo 2-player controller. I will be using my newly made arcade bartop, and hopefully control everything with my joysticks and buttons.

I am getting a little blown away with everything I read about configuring controls for the frontend (emulationstation) and configuring "global" controls for the emulators in Retroarch. I have read a lot of tutorials but they either talk about controllers (snes) or arcade button layouts that differs from mine. So now I'm afraid I will screw up everything trying to configure MY button layout to work with the emulators.

Okay, so here is the newbie-questions, which probably is stupid, but I hope you can bear with me. I know I can configure stuff myself in the configuration file, but how do I know which button on my cabinet corresponds to which value/number in the configuration file? For instance, I see something like this in a tutorial (from Gameroomsolutions, with the same Xin Mo-2-player-controller, but different button layout):

input_player1_b_btn = 3
input_player1_y_btn = 0
input_player1_select_btn = 7
input_player1_start_btn = 6
input_player1_up_axis = -1
input_player1_down_axis = +1
input_player1_left_axis = -0
input_player1_right_axis = +0
input_player1_a_btn = 4
input_player1_x_btn = 1
input_player1_l_btn = 2
input_player1_r_btn = 5
input_player2_b_btn = 3
input_player2_y_btn = 0
input_player2_select_btn = 7
input_player2_start_btn = 6
input_player2_up_axis = -1
input_player2_down_axis = +1
input_player2_left_axis = -0
input_player2_right_axis = +0
input_player2_a_btn = 4
input_player2_x_btn = 1
input_player2_l_btn = 2
input_player2_r_btn = 5
input_enable_hotkey_btn = 9
input_exit_emulator_btn = 8
input_menu_toggle_btn = 1
input_load_state_btn = 2
input_save_state_btn = 5
input_reset_btn = 3
input_state_slot_increase_axis = +0
input_state_slot_decrease_axis = -0
input_volume_up_axis = -1
input_volume_down_axis = +1

If I were to do make a simular setup, but with my own button layout (which for instance have fewer buttons, and they are placed differently), how would I know what number/value MY different button are? Like what the number/value is on of the system buttons I have on my control panel.

I mean, to change things to fit my buttons, I need to know what value/number retropie sees it as, right?

Ah crap, I don't know how to explain it well. Do you understand my question? Theres is like an information overload in my head since everything is new to me, so the answer might be right in front of me.

I hope you understand and can help me. Thanks.

By the way, if it helps, I have an image of my button layout here: https://goo.gl/photos/K1iY7fXHHchsTfUW7
It shows the buttons and the number is how it is seen when I checked the Xin Mo in windows (Red numbers are one player, and dark green is two player). It says MAME-layout and I know I have to go into MAME to get it right, but what I am asking is about how to get these buttons to work for all emulators.

[wetriner]

The complicated configuration layout in retroarch is a good thing. You can essentially start with an all around useful configuration that will work with most of your games by default Then for systems that really need a different layout, you can specify those changes(doesn't even have to be the full config) in the system specific retroarch.cfg and those settings will override the global. Then lastly, if you just need to override the global for one specific game, that's possible too.

Now I'm not positive this is what will get you the button info you're looking for, since I'm not positive how your Xin-mo works. But for most people, running jstest /dev/input/js0 will give you an interactive way to figure it out in the terminal. Try js1, js2, js3 etc... if js0 doesn't work or isn't both.

If you don't want to do that over and over, taking a little time to take note of your buttons values in your layout would probably be a good idea.

[SteffenMB]

@wetriner Thanks, I will try to run that test. Looks like that might just be what I was looking for :-)