Can't map controllers.. about to give up.

[vicfrankenstein]

I've had Launchbox for a month and it's rendered my cabinet unusable.  With retropie, I was up and going in no time.  I don't know what I'm doing wrong.

 

I have four controllers hooked to four USB Zero Delays.  They are mapped in Big Box itself.   Then I went and mapped each one on retroarch.  There we go.  With the retro pie, that was it.... Now they would work in the game.

However, when I play NBA Jam tournament edition, only one controller shows up.  The other ones don't work.  Also my retro arch hot key binds don't work so I cant open the in game menu to fine tune the controls.

 

Then I launch NBA Jam TE again, but this time go to Launch With then it shows retroarch, I click start, then the word changes to mame_liberto, I hit start again, now it starts.  All four players are working, except now several of the controller directions are reversed.  I can get into retro arch and it shows 1.7.7 MAME, but I still can't find tune my joysticks.

 

I'm not sure where to go from here.   What does it launch when I just click play?  What does it launch when I go through and click launch with?  Why are they different?  

Where can I find tune these?

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated, after a couple weeks of not being able to even use this, I don't know what to do.

 

[Retronaut]

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.

[fromlostdays]

If you bind the RA hotkeys to the controller, you can't use the keyboard hotkeys to open the menu. Open retroarch solo outside of everything and set up a keyboard hotkey to open menu. (you can set it back later) That's step 1, you have to be able to access the RA menu in game.

"However, when I play NBA Jam tournament edition, only one controller shows up. "

Are you checking to see that the other inputs P2, P3 are set to a different controller in Retroarch? At the top of the controller menu you can tell it which controller to bind to which input, but in truth Windows assigns random IDs every time you plug and unplug so they can sometimes get wonky. It shouldn't be hard to fix though provided you can get into the RA menu.

"What does it launch when I just click play?  What does it launch when I go through and click launch with?  Why are they different? " 

It launches whatever your default emulator is. You can check this by going to Tools, manage emulators, click one, click the Associated Platforms tab and see if the system is checked as default. Launch with only applies if you have more than one emulator setup to launch a single system. This leads me to:

"Then I launch NBA Jam TE again, but this time go to Launch With then it shows retroarch, I click start, then the word changes to mame_liberto, I hit start again, now it starts.  All four players are working, except now several of the controller directions are reversed.  I can get into retro arch and it shows 1.7.7 MAME, but I still can't find tune my joysticks."

It sounds like MAME is your default emulator for whatever system you're using. If that's the case, see above, you'll have to use the TAB key in mame to set your inputs. 

It seems like you could really benefit from watching a few LB tutorials.  I never messed with RetroPie this does require a little bit of knowhow on PC. We're here to answer any questions but you're asking more advanced questions without knowing some of the basics. 

 

 

Edited March 7, 2021 by fromlostdays

[vicfrankenstein]

Thanks everyone, I will try those options and let you know.

I'm not trying to circumvent the learning process, I've been trying to find videos on this, but can't.  The majority of the videos cover xbox controllers or mainly how to organize.  I got the wolfanoz pack so everything seems organized.  It is just the fine tuning, and honestly I'd love to learn more about what and why it's working.  So any videos you can recommend, I would appreciate.

 

Thanks again for all your help!

[Lordmonkus]

I would suggest using stand alone Mame over the RA core, it behaves much better with controllers than RA.

[Retronaut]

6 hours ago, Lordmonkus said:

I would suggest using stand alone Mame over the RA core, it behaves much better with controllers than RA.

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.

 

 

 

 

 

[vicfrankenstein]

Tab worked perfectly! Apparently the MAME core was overriding everything from retroarch.  Thanks everyone!  

 

Quick question, I've watched videos on Retroarch, but apparently every game uses a different core within retroarch, so I need to learn these too.  Any good videos you would recommend that does a bit more of a deep dive rather than just how to set it up?  I'd love to know how it works so I can know how to fix it.

[fromlostdays]

I don't know any indepth retroarch video tutorials, but that doesn't mean they aren't out there.

But Retroarch isn't an emulator, its more like a front end for other emulators called Cores. However, the options for stuff like controls, bezels, settings etc. can all be saved on a per game, per core, per directory, or (every system at the same time) basis. It can be a bit confusing. On top of that, each core will have its own Core Options and Controller options etc. under Quick Menu, which you can only access when a game is open. I'm just making this more confusing aren't I? haha.

I think what I'm trying to say is that beyond the Core Options you can still use uniform settings across Retroarch for A LOT of the cores. MAME is a bit of a one off having to go into the Tab menu. Most Cores will just use whatever you have configured as general inputs.