Anyone? I didn't think it would be difficult, I just dont know how to remap keys.

I just need to change the keyboard keys for tab, enter, escape, up and down to joystick functions.

I got it working, but I want it working for the boot menu. It's fine in the emulators.

Console? Which console?

And actually, I reinstalled PiMAME because I wanted a clean install after I did so much mucking about working on the roms and joystick, and now the joystick doesn't work in the emulators anymore.

I have not installed a driver for it, but it shows up in /dev/input/ as js0.

I didn't install any package to get the joystick to work. But it shows up as js0.

How do I check the output from an input device on the command line?

Rather than use a USB joystick, I rewired some arcade parts to GPIO (used a breakout cobbler board from adafruit) and then went and compiled their retrogame code to map the GPIO pins to keyboard presses. It was fairly trivial to get the buttons I wanted mapped to the default mame keys (including ESC, so I can go completely keyboard free!)

I also needed to enable the uinput module at boot time.

I don't know if there is a module that needs to be loaded before USB joypads can be used in linux, but I suspect there is.

Baby steps here. I've installed jstest but I can't quite figure out how to use it.

I'm trying:

jstest --event js0

Nothing I touch on the joystick seems to do anything.

Check this out for wiring your joysticks and buttons to the GPIO pins.

http://learn.adafruit.com/retro-gaming-with-raspberry-pi/buttons

What I did was to get a cobbler breakout board from adafruit and solder all my connections to that. It's nicely laid out with solder holes, and has a ribbon cable so that you can connect it to the pi. That way avoids soldering pins directly to the pi, and I can easily unhook the pi from all the buttons if/when I need to pull the pi out and do work on it.

http://learn.adafruit.com/adafruit-pi-cobbler-kit/overview

I simply edited the retrogame code and added what keys I wanted for each pin, compiled it, dropped it in /home/pi. Then I set up uinput to load at boot time and got rc.local to start it -- as per the instructions.

All the buttons and joystick directions need to have a common "ground" connection (so one side of each button and joystick switch are all wired together in a ground circuit), and that in turn is wired to the ground pin on the board. Then you wire each direction/button to it's respective GPIO pin.
I managed to cram 4 joystick directions, 5 game buttons, player 1&2 buttons, as well as coin insert, ESC, and I have one spare (which I may wire to F3 for reset, or TAB for menu -- not sure yet -- but this could have been a sixth button if I had room for one on my case.)

To go completely keyboard free with the PI, I created a short script to act as a "maintenance window" before automatically starting up any emulator. This gives you a 3 second window to break out of the script with Ctrl-C and get a bash shell. Unless you've been silly and configured both CTRL and C to seperate output buttons, you won't be able to break out of the script without a keyboard attached - which is the goal.
Without this script, and since the emulator is going to be autostarting, we'd have no opportunity to stop the pi and we'd likely lose control of it!

#!/bin/bash
echo "Loading MAME! Ctrl-C for maintenance"
sleep 3

I edited /home/pi/.profile. First task was to comment out the line that starts the pimame menu.

After that, I added three lines:
First I called the maintenance window script.
Next I called mame4all
Lastly I called shutdown -h now

So the way it works is that the pi starts up, triggers the maintenance window script, which if left alone, automatically finishes and then starts up MAME.
Since I have ESC wired to one of my buttons, when I am done playing, hitting it closes MAME and then .profile triggers off the shutdown command.

Now I am keyboard free! I'll post some photos later in another thread.

How should I be using jstest? I feel like I'm definitely doing it wrong...

@SSilver2k2

The PiSnes changes made for using the ps3 dual shock as a usb joystick I referred to earlier are here:

http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=78&t=42152&start=35

Hope it means something to you!

Cheers

Getting a USB joystick to work on the PiMAME menu is not going to be easy. As that responds to key presses.

if the menu could be activated with CTRL instead of return, that would also help a lot.
I suppose we could just recode the menu ourselves....

nayphee, can you detail how you did this please? I was trying to do this for the RPi shutdown with no luck.

I managed to hack the menu.py script to read the joystick controls using the pygame add-on but there's a known bug in the pygame binary for the raspberry pi where it constantly sends debug info to the screen. There's an updated version of the source code with the bug fixed but I haven't got a clue how to go about compiling it for the pi. If someone can point me in the right direction, it would be much appreciated.

I've discovered why I can't read keyboard presses in Pygame in a console window. Without rewriting the entire interface, I'll have to do it another way, which can wait for the time being. It works from the joystick which is what I wanted it to do. Let me know if you want the program.

for anyone still looking, i made a joystick menu. Details in this thread:
http://pimame.org/forum/discussion/710/jspimenu-joystick-based-emulator-selection-menu-for-pimame-keyboardless