Controller driving me crazy

[ayatollahbaloney]

I started off with retropie/retroarch/emulationstation, which "just works" out of the box, no documentation necessary. I decide I need a beefier system to emulate more games, and move on to a kaby lake i5 with a gtx1050ti.

And I'm trying to set launchbox/bigbox up to work kindalike emulationstation/retroarch. But the controls seem to be all over the place. If I attempt to use enable/volup in a game, the game closes (but it does adjust the volume, I'll give it that). In NES, select works as it should. With SNES however, select alone closes the game, making it impossible to select 2-player. And I haven't configured NES and SNES differently (both are retroarch cores). For PCSX2, enable/select doesn't close the game, for that I have to whip out the keyboard. But it does on NES. edit: Oh, and "A" on my X360 wireless controller also pauses the game on NES in addition to fire/jump/whatever the game usually does. What?

I'm becoming increasingly frustrated, and googling for setup tips nets a whole lot of terribly long-winded instruction videos. None of which (according to the title atleast) appear to deal with actually setting up the controller. To make it even worse, the instruction videos reference other instruction videos that are apparently vital. I don't have the patience to sit down and watch several days worth of videos to get this up and running. Isn't there documentation available in some format that can be skimmed to find the relevant parts quickly and then read those?

I have now decided to start from scratch, so I removed everything, and installed launchbox from scratch. I import all my NES roms and set up the default emulator for NES. Enter big box mode, enable controller, enable controller automation. I don't touch the controller assignments. I am then unable to go back to the main screen using "back", or using the keyboard. Only way out of settings is by exiting big box. Restarting big box and pressing "A" to enter NES games makes big box lock up. What the hell?

I'm beginning to regret paying for this...

[ayatollahbaloney]

Oh, and the big box process just hangs around when closing it, making it necessary to open task manager to close it. Or reboot. 

[Retro808]

I recommend using some the of tutorials. It really is easy, plus this forum is amazing at helping when you get in a spot. 

Here is a specific video tutorial for SNES.

Example: Using Retroarch to emulate SNES.

First you have to download Retroarch and the needed core for SNES you want to use then in the input setting of Retroarch set up your controller and your hotkeys. Then in Launchbox/BigBox import you roms and set the default. You also will need to set any specific controller/keyboard commands in LaunchBox/BigBox you want for use in LB/BB. These are separate from what you set in the emulator. Now both should run as you set them up. 

The retropie/retroarch/emulationstation is a bit different as most users are downloading an image where someone has already done the basic set-ups and all the user needs to do is connect a controller and set it up in Emulationstation. I know for me that's all I did. 

Edited May 5, 2017 by Retro808

[SentaiBrad]

For setting up a controller in RetroArch, it's actually done automatically if it's a 360, Xbox One, PS3 or PS4 controller (the last 2 require extra software to work with PC's). So it's even more so, download RA, import games, download the core, make sure the associated platform is set correctly and go.

Edit: I re-read the first post, and if you're having performance issues then something somewhere is screwing with Big Box. Once you've picked your controller, and set or left the keys at default it should work just fine. I would say that a few PC things should be done to make sure your PC is good to go first. Making sure Drivers and Codecs are up-to-date, as well as any Windows Updates. There's a few pieces of software listed here that should really help.

[SentaiBrad]

Oh, and for the record, EmulationStation is much more complicated to get up and running unless you go out and buy a pre-made box that is highly illegal. It's one thing to make a front end, which that's all EmulationStation does, and then it's up to the user to do the rest of it. It's another to go on ebay and sell boxes pre-loaded. Or, a friend helped / set it up for you, but the box resellers are a common plague in our hobby.

[ayatollahbaloney]

Just now, SentaiBrad said:

For setting up a controller in RetroArch, it's actually done automatically if it's a 360, Xbox One, PS3 or PS4 controller (the last 2 require extra software to work with PC's). So it's even more so, download RA, import games, download the core, make sure the associated platform is set correctly and go.

In theory. I tried automatic configuration. That really didn't work. I've spent the past 6 hours trying to get two controllers working with retroarch. I have absolutely no clue how I got it working, but the x360-controllers seem to finally have stuck after I first configured an ipega controller, then the two x360 controllers, and finally removed the ipega one. 
(some of my woes with retroarch: https://forums.libretro.com/t/cant-get-sane-controller-setup/10156)

Not all emulators are happy, for some reason pcsx2 refuses to let player 1 press "up" (yes, it's not retroarch, but I didn't touch controller config in pcsx2). And bigbox simply crashes on the first button press from a controller, so even though the emulators "mostly work", I can't actually use it as a 10-foot interface - which is why I actually paid for it.

[Lordmonkus]

You have to setup your controllers in the emulators themselves, that is not covered by Launchbox.

[SentaiBrad]

If everything is crashing or not working related to a controller, but it's working for all of us, then I am leaning towards a Driver issue actually. Something seems wrong there. Big Box should never crash like that (and doesn't for the record), and RetroArch and PCSX2 are working. RetroArch does automatically config the controller for Xinput controllers. The Ipega controller won't most likely. For Big Box, you will need to go in, select the controller you're using (or check the box to use all attached controllers at once, which can cause issues with some drivers and arcade boards), and then set up the needed controls. Also, you need to touch the controller config for PCSX2; RetroArch automatically doing it is actually rare. Most emulators don't.

[ayatollahbaloney]

Just now, SentaiBrad said:

Oh, and for the record, EmulationStation is much more complicated to get up and running unless you go out and buy a pre-made box that is highly illegal. It's one thing to make a front end, which that's all EmulationStation does, and then it's up to the user to do the rest of it. It's another to go on ebay and sell boxes pre-loaded. Or, a friend helped / set it up for you, but the box resellers are a common plague in our hobby.

Emulationstation, as it is in retropie, is dead easy. Write an SD card, insert into RPI, boot, autoconfigure controller. Upload roms to a folder, and off you go. 

I've set up emulationstation on windows, and it worked fine. My one issue with emulationstation was that I couldn't get pcsx2 to exit with select/start like I can on launchbox. But I guess that is a smaller problem than "BB crashes on first button press". 

[DOS76]

Ipega BT controllers have to be configured in RA and they do work in BB

[DOS76]

I have a few of them

[ayatollahbaloney]

1 minute ago, SentaiBrad said:

If everything is crashing or not working related to a controller, but it's working for all of us, then I am leaning towards a Driver issue actually. Something seems wrong there. Big Box should never crash like that (and doesn't for the record), and RetroArch and PCSX2 are working. RetroArch does automatically config the controller for Xinput controllers. The Ipega controller won't most likely. For Big Box, you will need to go in, select the controller you're using (or check the box to use all attached controllers at once, which can cause issues with some drivers and arcade boards), and then set up the needed controls. Also, you need to touch the controller config for PCSX2; RetroArch automatically doing it is actually rare. Most emulators don't.

I'm using the latest microsoft driver. And BB most definitely crashes "like that". It doesn't respond to keyboard when this happens. The only thing that works is ctrl-alt-del. 

[ayatollahbaloney]

Just now, DOS76 said:

Ipega BT controllers have to be configured in RA and they do work in BB

Yes, I did that. And that worked. But I don't want to use the Ipega controller. However, once I had configured the Ipega controller and then configured the x360 controllers, the config worked. 

[DOS76]

Yeah I've never had an issue with a 360 pad needing to be configured

[Zombeaver]

Yeah I think there's some confusion here - LB/BB doesn't have the kind of interaction with the emulators that I get the impression you think it does. LB/BB doesn't have any relation to the individual emulator controller configuration. It has Controller Automation that has some additional functions that can be placed on top of the emulators (like closing the emulator) but setting up your actual controls is done on a per-emulator basis, within the emulators themselves.

LB is essentially a visually pleasing, easily manageable, organized collection of Windows shortcuts... that's about it. There's some additional functionality on top of that that's designed to take care of some common issues that you'll encounter with some emulators, but basically that's all it is - you're using it to organize a collection of shortcuts which are essentially indicating that you want to direct one file (rom) at another file (emulator exe) and possibly injecting additional parameters via command line if you so choose. It's not going to configure the emulators themselves for you; controls or otherwise. You have to setup controls for Retroarch, Mednafen, Demul, etc. within the settings for each of those emulators. Controller Automation is just on top of that.