Retronaut

Definitely. If you have 4 Zero delay USB controllers, I don't think Retroarch will work at the moment because of the stable controller ID problem - you'll need to use the standalone Mame. Also, I don't know if your cabinet is an upright or a cocktail cabinet. But if it's a cocktail one, and you use standalone Mame, it's really easy to rotate the screen 90 degrees for vertical games, so you can play shmups using the controllers on the narrow ends of the cabinet (and if you hit TAB and set those machine dip switches to "cocktail" for games like pacman it will flip the screen in two player mode - you need to exit and reload the rom for the settings to stick), while horizontal games like fighting games can still use the two controllers on the long side. I have a 4 player cocktail cabinet. I ended up making two copies of the Mame folder, calling one exe "Mame_upright" and the other "Mame_cocktail", so I could set them up separately (e.g. for pacman I want player 1 and player 2 to be on the narrow ends, but for Streetfighter I want player 1 and 2 on the long side of the cabinet). I copied across any vertical games I wanted to play from the main arcade folder into a new folder, created a Launchbox platform, "Cocktail" and set the emulator for that platform to "Mame_cocktail". That way you can play co-operative shooters like Twin Cobra from the long horizontal side of the cabinet that has two controllers, but if you're playing alone, you can play the same game vertically from the side. There's probably an easier way to sort this out, but it's what I managed to figure out so far and it worked for me. p.s. If you're plugging your buttons into your zero delay controllers, don't leave gaps between them (i.e. don't do 1,2,3...11,12) if you want to use Daphne at some point. I had issues with that.

I'm fairly new to this, but if Retroarch is running the mame_libretro core, can you press TAB from within the NBA game, bring up the Mame menu, and check the "INPUTS FOR THIS MACHINE" mappings, to make sure they aren't overwriting the higher level ones? If that's not the problem, then the random remapping sounds similar to an issue I had with multiple controllers using Retroarch and Windows 10. Although it would affect every game, not just the NBA one. Windows 10 likes to swap joystick configurations over randomly when you boot up (if you Google "stable controller IDs" you'll find out about it). So even though you haven't unplugged anything, joystick 1 becomes joystick 4, and no longer works, so you can't navigate Retroarch menus etc. It was a real pain. When I tried to set up Mame mappings from within Retroarch, it wouldn't even see the joystick half the time. If it is this with your cabinet, then it's fixable without too much hassle. But not using Retroarch, as far as I know. In the end I used Mame itself, which allows you to map each joystick in a way that preserves the mappings even when windows 10 decides to randomly swap them all around. This guy shows you how to do it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmjfwLuZ_X0 Since I did that, I've had no problems at all. There are other solutions, but they rely on the USB encoders all having different hardware IDs and these cheap Chinese encoders all have identical IDs, so it didn't work for me. But using Mame without retroarch and following the steps in that video fixed the problem. If you search for "Mame nonag" you'll find a version that doesn't pop up anything when you load a rom. I got one from this forum. And the shaders are decent enough that I don't miss the Retroarch ones. So maybe first step is to check to see if your joysticks are being swapped over? If they are, you should be able to use the retroarch menu using whichever one of the four has taken the place of joystick 1. If so, you can go into Inputs (port bindings I think) and swap them over so Port 1 becomes joystick X - but you don't want to have to do that every time.