Retroarch controller setup iPac ultimate

[adamtoth]

I am new to the Retroarch world and having a helluva time figuring out my controller mapping.

I have a three sided cocktail table - at the short ends are a joystick and three buttons each, and when sitting on the long side, there are controls for two players. The long side is controlled by an iPac ultimate board which is seen by the OS as a keyboard, and the two short sides are each plugged into a xinmo zero delay usb encoder. This is so that I can choose to play vertical arcade games on the short sides in cocktail mode, and horizontal games on the long side. 
 

It all works fine for MAME natively since I can map all the controller inputs easily, and I don’t use Retroarch for this, just plain old MAME as the emulator for the Arcade platform.

But I am also trying to run various console platforms on the long side, NES, SNES, Sega Master, etc using Retroarch.

Retroarch is totally confused by all these controllers plugged in. I want it to ignore the 2 xinmo encoders, and just see the ipac as a keyboard like MAME does. But I can’t seem to get it to work right.

If I load an NES game (Mesen core), and load the menu and check out the Controls area, and create a Remap file for that core, I can edit the file and change the device type to “3” for ports 1 and 2 to make them keyboard inputs. Then I can start configuring various buttons, but they don’t seem to work. For example, my Coin 1 button is plugged into Coin1 on the iPac, which maps to Keyboard #5 by default. I’d like that to be the Select button for NES, so I configure Retroarch Port 1 so that Select is mapped to Keyboard #5, save the core remap file, close and restart the game, press the coin 1 button, and nothing happens, no Select is sent to the loaded game.

Has anyone else gotten a keyboard emulator like the iPac to work with Retroarch?

 

[purplebot]

Hi, I don't have an iPac.  But I have an Xtension Emulator Edition controller. It comes in keyboard mode, setup for MAME. But there are two other modes: D-Input, and X-Input that I can change it to by holding down some buttons.

D-Input mode presents the controller to Retroarch as two separate d-pads for me to setup.  X-Input present it as two separate xbox controllers.

Does the iPac have something similar?  You may need to just change the mode.

[Headrush69]

49 minutes ago, purplebot said:

Does the iPac have something similar?  You may need to just change the mode.

Yes it does.

Retroarch treats controllers and keyboard independent, so you can map your iPac keyboard to a Retropad layout in  retroarch.cfg file.

Example of mine:

Quote

input_player1_a = "z"
input_player1_b = "v"
input_player1_l = "ctrl"
input_player1_l2 = "space"
input_player1_l3 = "t"
input_player1_left = "left"
input_player1_r = "h"
input_player1_r2 = "x"
input_player1_r3 = "b"
input_player1_right = "right"
input_player1_start = "num1"
input_player1_up = "up"
input_player1_x = "shift"
input_player1_y = "c"

input_player1_select = "num5"

The only issue here is that your xinmo controllers are still active and they would still send input too. To avoid that I use a tool like devreorder to hide other inputs when necessary.

Edited July 14, 2020 by Headrush69