Replicate gamepad button detection on emulation station in Ubuntu

pqueiro

Good morning!

I apologise if this doesn't fit here, but I've been trawling the webs and have found precious little else to help me :(

Long story short I installed Retropie onto a Pi 1 and loved it. I especially loved that it picked up my two gamepads correctly, including analogs, d-pad, face buttons, etc. However, since the Pi 1 can't really handle N64 games, I installed emulationstation on a more powerful Ubuntu machine, but this one doesn't pick up the buttons correctly:

It ignores the analogs
only asks for 2 face buttons ("a" and "b"), but asks for "page up" and "page down"
doesn't ask for all four shoulder buttons

End result is games sort of work but they're inconsistent - I'm assuming Retroarch picks up an auto-config but it works out weird (i.e., different physical buttons on each controller map to "x"). jstest confirms numbering is different (button 0 on one controller isn't the same physical button on the other), which would explain this inconsistency with Retroarch's auto-config. Retropie's detection allowed me to bypass this and get everything working right.

So my question is: can I replicate retropie's gamepad detection on a standard install of emulationstation? How?

Digging through the RPi's install I can find the .cfg files from retroarch for the controllers. Can I just copy them over? Where would I put them on the other install? Would emulationstation then overwrite them for some reason?

Again, I'm sorry if this isn't the place, but emulationstation's own forums don't really work and two days of googling around haven't produced clear instructions :(

Thanks for any help you can give me!

BuZz

@pqueiro install retropie on the Ubuntu machine. See wiki for details. Our emulation station is customised.

pqueiro

@BuZz building it as we speak! Thanks! :)

pqueiro

@BuZz Reporting on success building Retropie on Lubuntu 16.04:

install from binaries does not exist, had to compile everything from source
some emulators are optimised for ARM architectures (or so packages say) - not sure how they're going to work over time
many emulators and ports failed to compile on first attempt; after 3 attempts, only a Doom port is still holding out (everything else reports OK, but haven't tested yet)
Mupen64plus was waaaaay too fast to be playable (tested on Mario Kart). Removed and re-installed from apt-get and everything seems to be OK (may be solution for other ARM-optimized packages)

Apart from that everything seems to be working fine :D thanks!!