The NEW Build Your Own Arcade Controls

Main => Raspberry Pi & Dev Board => Topic started by: Batchman on April 06, 2017, 09:31:13 am

Title: Need help Retropie gamepad only control config
Post by: Batchman on April 06, 2017, 09:31:13 am: So my first actual active project did not turn out to be anything like I thought it would be. Got a roommate who wanted to watch TV shows together, and was hauling an old, worn laptop to the living room to use as a media center, but the constant moving was damaging the laptop (broken hinge, screen connection problems). Had been reading about using a Pi 3 as both media center and retro gaming center, so when I could afford it a couple of days ago, I bought a Pi and a 64gb sd card. Threw the Nacho image on it, and poof, media player and retro gaming center.

The problem is, I have no idea how to control lots of it using only a game pad.

Played an arcade game, and had no way out of it. (At all, since I don't have a USB keyboard. One is on order and will be here Saturday.)

The gamepad I am using is probably a Sega Genesis clone. It has a direction pad, a start button, three main buttons, three smaller buttons, and one button on the back of the pad which I think is called a shoulder button?

Can I? And if so, how can I? Use the shoulder button in combination with the other six buttons, to simulate the TAB and ESC keys, for accessing MAME menus and exiting MAME back into Emulation Station?

Since I have no USB keyboard for now, and I am told it is very dangerous to turn your Pi off improperly, and I have no way out of it, my Pi is going to be playing the same arcade game for the next two days. I'd like to avoid this in the future. So how can I set up 'shift key' style controls in MAME?
Title: Re: Need help Retropie gamepad only control config
Post by: mahuti on April 06, 2017, 10:08:22 am: The methods needed to make the configuration changes would require a keyboard. You at least need a tab key to configure mame, or you need to modify the config files for mame manually which also requires a keyboard.

In other emulators under retroarch you hit start+select to exit. Mame still uses the 'esc' key.

That said, i've pulled the plug on my Raspberry Pi hundreds of times improperly. It can potentially corrupt the SD cards if you were in the middle of doing something that writes changes to the card, but I've not had it happen (yet) during all of my testing and setup. From what I hear it is more likely a problem on the slower (cheaper) SD cards. In any case, I'd just shut it off if you want to.
Title: Re: Need help Retropie gamepad only control config
Post by: mahuti on April 08, 2017, 10:04:35 am: One thing I wasn't thinking about... you can SSH into your raspberry pi and make the changes from your laptop.

You have to open a terminal and type:

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ssh pi@192.168.1.86(or whatever your Rpi's IP address is... usually your local network followed by 86 by default)

it'll then ask for the password which is "raspberry" by default

Then go to the directory for the config files which is

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cd /opt/retropie/configsthen list the folders

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ls
then you have to manually edit your config files. I use advmame which would be:

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sudo pico /opt/retropie/configs/mame-advmame/advmame-0.94.0.rc
each of the mame versions (mame4all mame-libretro) have different config files. I think most are named mame.cfg. Once in the file, you'd have to figure out know what your joystick keys are. In the advmame setup for instance I have

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input_map[start1] joystick_button[0,6] or keyboard[0,1] so that my joystick button 6 can start a game in mame.

mame4all has a few mapped by default (I think)

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#Joystick controls for frontend only #Defaults to XBOX360 controller J_START=7 J_SELECT=6 J_A=0 AXIS_LR=0 AXIS_UD=1
Anyway, that's a rough overview.