Retroarch controls frustration

[Edgecrusher]

I have a cocktail build I made for my wife some years ago that until recently was running Retropie and featured a CRT screen. After years of fighting the raspberry pi issues and the terrible picture quality I said, you know what, I've proved I could make this thing with a CRT, I just want something reliable that is fun to play and look at now. So I converted it to a 19" LCD monitor and built an old Dell Optiplex 5060 With BigBox. That's when I started getting carried away and decided instead of just running Arcade games (mame) on this thing, I'm going to really make her happy and load it up with NES and SNES titles and even throw in some old Atari 5200 games I used to like. 

This cocktail has run with two sanwa type joy sticks and cheap arcade buttons which work fine for mame games and use the cheap zero delay USB boards to connect to the PC. I believe they are seen as keyboards technically. The problem started when I started using Retroarch with the Nintendo games and plugged in a USB SNES style gamepad I bought off of Amazon. All I can imagine is running a PC with Windows10 and having so many "controllers" plugged in via USB must be causing some issues.

The gamepads will work up until the point where I enter a nintendo game(retroarch) and as that loads I get about 4 to 6 different messages in the lower left hand corner rifling through inputs and saying something has fallen back to something else. It seems to be different messages most times. I've studied how to change input settings and played with different driver settings, but no matter what I do, whenever I start the game, the inputs go crazy and all my configs go out the window. I've even tried removing the sanwas and buttons to see if they were causing the conflict, but the gamepads still won't work after the game loads. It's like they're not there at all. Neither do the Sanwas or arcade buttons when they're plugged in. If I go to the quick menu in game and try to set up 'binds' nothing registers. I have to do everything with the keyboard. (that kinda just gave me an idea to try without the keyboard connected next)

 

When I took these gamepads to my pc at work which runs launchbox, but does not have any other controllers I don't have any problems. It's plug an play for the most part. Once in awhile I find a title I need to adjust the mapping for, but that's normal. 

Is there any suggestions on what I might be doing wrong or is asking Retroarch to play nice with my Mame setup on a PC too much to ask??

I really don't understand why I can't figure it out. There's lots of people with homemade Mame arcades I see and they run wireless controllers also. Wireless are also USB basically. So is there something I don't understand about Retroarch? Do I need better Controller boards like IPACs instead of these zero delays??

Hoping someone can steer me in the right direction.

[Edgecrusher]

In case someone ends up here and has a similar problem to mine, I ended up finding a solution, but it wasn't the solution I was looking for. I found a download called Zadig that I used to update the driver for the usb device referred to as gamepad to the usblibk driver. When went back to retroarch to my surprise the device it was connected to was now the generic joystick controller which happens to be my arcade controls. So instead of making that USB SNES gamepad work, I got the arcade controls built into my cabinet to start working. I'm not sure if this is better, but I really don't feel like poking the bear any further and losing the progress I've made. Some games are hard to set up using the sanwa joysticks, especially the Atari 5200 which originally had a very unique controller. For example, trying Super Breakout I found the joystick had no inbetween and just made the paddle slam from side to side. I tried adjusting the sensitivity a bit but didn't notice any change. I can't say it won't work because I haven't tried too hard yet, but I would at least expect a lot of fine tuning for each and every game in that system. I also need to figure out how to work in a number pad since a lot of 5200 games needed that input to play like one of my favorites Dreadnaught Factor.

Despite no one having any help for me, I hope i could have helped someone else. If it did, please leave a message and let me know what results you had and if you  found any tricks to making multiple controllers work with each other in a Windows installed retroarch.