Arcade joystick works in PiPlay but not in ROMs
  • Eggwhite
    Hi. I have configured my joystick and buttons under Controller Setup and it works fine in PiPlay. When I run ./retrogame I get the same key combo as the keyboard equivalent (say ^[[A for Up) but when I run any ROMs the joystick and buttons aren't recognised. Please help if possible.
  • mholgatemmholgatem
    Which emulator are you using? If you are using mame4all, it has to be configured in game as it doesn't have an accessible config file for piplay to write to.
  • Eggwhite
    Sorry this is AdvMame. In the ROMs I can configure keyboard keys but the joystick and buttons are ignored.
  • mholgatemmholgatem
    hmm... what type of joystick are you using?
  • Eggwhite
    It's a happ style arcade joystick with microswitches. Up down left and right on gpio ports.
  • mholgatemmholgatem
    do you have retrogame set to auto run in the background?

    you can manually run it in the background by using
    sudo ./retrogame &

    - or -

    you can add that same line of code anywhere in /home/pi/.profile, just make sure that you either cd into the retrogame directory or replace the ./ with the full path.
  • Eggwhite
    It already runs auto.atically. I can navigate around Piplay using the joystick and button 1 its only when I play any of the ROMs the joystick isn't recognised
  • mholgatemmholgatem
    hmmm.... maybe try unplugging your physical keyboard, run the controller setup, then test a game.
  • Eggwhite
    Crikey that's worked for one of the ROMs at least for the joystick. Could you tell me why that might have worked please? I'll do some more digging on the forums then.
  • mholgatemmholgatem
    Well, for advMAME anyway, the config can differentiate between keyboards ( example -player_1_up [keyboard0, up] ). so you could go through your advmame.cfg file and and just duplicate all of your keyboard0 entries to include keyboard1 as well.
  • Eggwhite
    Ah I see. I've found if I set up the controls and then unplug the keyboard everything works as expected. It looks as though some of the software was getting confused receiving keystrokes from 2 "keyboards" if you consider the GPIO joystick as a keyboard. Well, that took 2 weeks to solve but I've sure learned a lot about the Pi and Linux in the meantime.

    Thanks so much for your time and advice you've been a great help :o)
  • mholgatemmholgatem
    yeah, no problem. I'd be interested to find if we can force one of the keyboards to be keyboard 0 or keyboard 1.
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