Retropie Daphne Joystick Woes

[Vocalitus]

After reinstalling Daphne for the third time my Dragonrise encoder (which works with everything else) refuses to work with the said emulator.  So I rotate the joystick and where up is now left, it still doesn't work.

Looking on the net, it seems I am not the only one.

Am I stuck to playing the game with a wireless keyboard?

What gives?  Why does it not work with Retropie?

If I am wasting my time I'll gladly replace the Pi with a M73 (they are cheaper than an I-PAC2).

[Gilrock]

I've gotten Daphne working with RetroPie with a couple different joystick/encoders.  I followed the comments in the dapinput.ini file and manually edited it to match my button numbers.
https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Daphne/

First from a terminal or ssh session run: jstest /dev/input/js0
Note what changes when you press each button and joystick direction.

Edit the 3rd column in the dapinput.ini and you add 1 to each value because 0 is reserved.  There are usually 2 different ways the joysticks can be mapped.  If you use the joystick connector on the encoder then its the same value for all 4 directions...i.e. for joystick0 you would enter 1 for all 4 directions.  That is the type of input where you may need to rotate your joystick.  I had to do that on my first one a few years ago.  The other way is you have a joystick that uses switch type inputs so every direction is its own switch value.

[Vocalitus]

I literally did everything in your post.

I even added a switch for analog and digital on the encoder thinking that will fix it.

Still doesn't work.

My solution is to use an $5 Arduino clone to add regular keyboard commands to Retropie. 

Thanks for the help.

[Gilrock]

I will add one thing I remembered.  I'm using a joystick that has leaf switches.  At first I tried to wire then into the encoder inputs labeled Up, Down, Left, and Right.  It did not work out well at all.  I noticed in the js0 program that when I activated a switch it would show 32768 and then back to 0 but every so often I'd see a 16384 value.  I moved all those joystick switch inputs down to the bottom row of button inputs and it started working flawlessly.  I never looked into it but with those large values it appeared to be expecting an analogue range for those connectors.

[Vocalitus]

I will add one thing I remembered.  I'm using a joystick that has leaf switches.  At first I tried to wire then into the encoder inputs labeled Up, Down, Left, and Right.  It did not work out well at all.  I noticed in the js0 program that when I activated a switch it would show 32768 and then back to 0 but every so often I'd see a 16384 value.  I moved all those joystick switch inputs down to the bottom row of button inputs and it started working flawlessly.  I never looked into it but with those large values it appeared to be expecting an analogue range for those connectors.

I see the same thing then I remembered the add one to the button control and the rest of the unused buttons for Space Ace was for some unused number.

I was hoping you could elaborate on the moving the joystick switch inputs down like moving key=left down to key=exit?

I think the controls are reversed at the moment.

Thanks

[Gilrock]

By moving down I mean if you view the board with the USB connector on the left you plug into the bottom row instead of the top row.  You can see in this photo how I've plugged the joystick inputs into the bottom row.  At first I had them on the top row where its labeled Up, Down, Right, Left and it seemed to work for some games but was a big problem for Daphne.  I figured the other games where probably missing some inputs but didn't show the problem as much as a game like Dragon's Lair where any bad input causes a fail.

[Vocalitus]

I have the joystick wired into the controller port so I will try it your way and I hope for some success.

Thank you very much for your time on this.   

[Gilrock]

I have the joystick wired into the controller port so I will try it your way and I hope for some success.

Thank you very much for your time on this.   

What do you mean by the "controller port"?  Is that the 5 pin connector on the top left of my photo?  If you have the type of joystick that uses that 5 pin cable then that's where it needs to plug in.

[Vocalitus]

Well I bought another encoder board as I needed the two pin plugs to try the other UDLR option on the DragonRise and sadly it doesn't work. 

I have to sacrifice a KADE for the endeavor.  Apparently its a bug in the daphne emulator core that is making the joystick non detectable.

Plug in a keyboard or Xbox gamepad and it works perfectly.

Oh well.