How to swap 1st/2nd player joystick controls in FBALPHA for my arcade cabinet for ease of play

pedrohead

I have a two player arcade cabinet that I built, and when playing 1-player games that don't require buttons (like Frogger, PacMan, etc.) I prefer to use the 2nd player joystick to navigate by default, as it's closer to the center of the control panel.

For those games that use Mame2003, I can hit "tab" and go into the options and map the joystick controls to use either the player 1 or player 2 joystick at the same time.

I have games that require FBALPHA (like the PacMan fast hacks) where I don't have access to the full control mapping like in Mame2003.

I see where I can go into retroarch for FBALPHA and map the buttons, but it doesn't let me swap (or simultaneously use) the controls from the 2nd player position as the 1st player position.

Is it possible to do this somewhere?

Dukafleed

either by retroarch - as game specific configuration or use 2 diffrent folders like arcade and mame or manually editing the cfg file for each emulator,

i could be wrong

pedrohead

Thanks, I tried looking for something like that, but when you assign buttons in Retroarch, you can't move between players buttons, only the buttonset/joystickset of each player.

And checking the specific cfg file for fbalpha, I don't see where the button mapping is mapped specifically for player one or two, the names of the buttons are all generic to the player, not universal.

hhmmmm... any other ideas? I'm sure it can be done somehow.

Dukafleed

@pedrohead you will not find the system specific botton maps in the customized system cfg... meaning that all syatem will use the all\retroarch.cfg unless you specify a system custom maps which will be included in "for example" snes\retroarch.cfg

so basicly you will need to add the wanted system mapping in your system trtroarch.cfg to override the all system default

look at this for better understanding
https://github.com/retropie/retropie-setup/wiki/retroarch-configuration

pedrohead

@Dukafleed

Thanks. So looking at the example they showed on that site, they specify the player one and player two joystick index. It looks like I could just specify that "input_player1_joypad_index = 1" instead of "0" and that could do the trick.

But that ends up being for all fbalpha games, right? I can't specify that per game? I don't know that I want that config to be for all fbalpha games, but I know some of them will.

Am I understanding that correctly? Thanks for the help.

pedrohead

like would i manually create a new file called "/home/pi/RetroPie/roms/fbalpha/ROMNAME.cfg"

that would have nothing in it but the text:

input_player1_joypad_index = 1

would something like that do it?

FlyingTomahawk

In the past when I was looking through the settings I stumbled over a setup that lets you set/swap the input numbers. Default is 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
You could then set it up like this 1, 0, 2, 3, 4 , 5, 6

I just can't recall where exactly that was. It is somewhere in the menu that has that blue background with that grey box in the middle gui.

pedrohead

@FlyingTomahawk like that's something you can change while in retropie (as in, not something you have to change with a keyboard outside of ES)? Thx.

FlyingTomahawk

@pedrohead

Found it!
In ES go to RetroPie and select "configuration editor".
Then select the first one "configure basic libretro emulator options"
Then select and click the core you want to edit, lets say for this example number 8 "configure additional options for fba"
Next, number 7 is what you should look for, where it says "choose joypad order (0 1 2 3 )"
Change the port numbers here to swap the controls for the fba core.

I am not sure if it works for your case but it did for me in the past.

pedrohead

@FlyingTomahawk

Thanks, I found that and it did work for the whole ROM as well. What I ended up doing (since I didn't want to change all the FBA setups) was to create a ROM-specific file like "pacmanf.zip.cfg" and just add the line "input_player1_joypad_index = 1", and save that in the ROM directory and that did the job as well.

Thanks everyone for the help.

Dukafleed

@pedrohead super, im glad it worked out