Wired XBox 360 controller not working in games

brianinkc

I've beat my head on the wall with this and can't figure it out. I have a wired x360 controller and it works fine in the Emulationstation menus but as soon as I load a game it quits working. My keyboard works but I can't get the joypad to work. I looked for retroarch-joyconfig thinking I needed to run that but can't find it on the server anywhere. I attempted to manually edit /opt/retropie/config/all and add entries for player 1 but that also seems to do nothing. The option to "register retroarch controller" also seems to be missing from the retropie_setup menu... probably because the binary is missing.

Any help here would be seriously appreciated.

This is a raspbian build that I installed retropie on top of from binaries just yesterday. Everything is running current version as of today's date.

Thanks,

wetriner

What steps did you take to configure your controller? Any guide or video using retroarch-joyconfig is going to be pretty old. Also, the retropie menu option for registering retroarch controller doesn't exist any more. These guides are usually correct, but once paths and options get changed. It kind of defeats the purpose of following them.

Typically all you should really have to do, is configure in the emulationstation configure input menu option. That should automatically generate a file in /opt/retropie/configs/all/retroarch-joypads with the button mappings.

Another thing is what system are you using to test the controls? Because some systems have to be manually configured to work, and others(lr-) should work right after you configure the first time.

I have a wired xbox360, and it will work with xpad or xboxdrv in emulationstation and lr- emulated games.

In any case the Wiki is going to be the most reliable source of information.

brianinkc

@wetriner , I realized everything I was reading was pretty outdated once I watched the video below and was hopeful that since it was posted this year it would be my solution. The video mentions a fix for my exact problem (changing input_joypad_driver froms sdl2 to udev) but the options mentioned are still not listed int he emulation station menu. I fumbled through the options I have on my menu and found the line in the config is already set to udev so I don't think that's the problem either. At that point I pretty much abandoned the video and came here.

I setup the raspbian via NOOBS and then installed retropie by following the https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki/Manual-Installation guide.

I'm mostly interested in getting NES, SNES, N64, Sega Megadrive and NeoGeo working. I've been testing with NES and that's where I'm seeing the failure. I accidentally launched Doom last night and it actually appeared that some of the controls were working, so there's that.

I'll start digging in the wiki today but if there's anything you can think of that would help I'd listen.

Here's the video that gave me hope that I was on the right track. It did explain some things but not everything:

wetriner

If you notice he's put annotations for that common question of where did retroarch-joycofig go at the start of the video.

Either way, I'm not sure why this is an issue for you. When I configure through emulationstation, it automatically uses input_drive="udev" for all my controllers. It's generated in controller config file in /opt/retropie/configs/all/retroarch-joypads/. If it it somehow generated with "sdl2", then I believe you can just change it in that file. If that file exists and looks similar to mine, then it should be working in most emulators. Just note mine has some custom hotkeys, so don't just copy and paste unless you want that and you have the exact controller name.

The only thing I could think that would be interfering with your controller working is incorrect config in either your /opt/retropie/configs/all/retroarch.cfg or /opt/retropie/configs/<SYSTEMNAME>/retroarch.cfg since these files will essentially override your main controller config.

https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki/RetroArch-Configuration

challenger2010

I am probably asking something you already done, but did you install the Xbox 360 driver? I had the same thing going on until I installed it. If you have it properly installed, the middle light on the controller won't be flashing.

brianinkc

@challenger2010 Yes, I've installed the driver, enabled it and set number of controllers to 1. The controller is plugged into port 0 (upper left) and the top left quarter of it lights up. When I start a game it doesn't complain that it's not configured... I'm so confused and frustrated on this one.

@wetriner at this point I think I'm going to uninstall RetroPie via the setup script and start over. Is there a specific guide that you would recommend following to re-install once the uninstall has finished?

wetriner

@brianinkc I have used my controller with both xpad and xboxdrv, and honestly I prefer the way xpad handles controllers. Yes, you get a blinking light, but that's nothing a little hardware modification can't fix. :P

https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki/First-Installation
https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki/Setting-up-the-XBox360-controller