RetroPie Setup - Auto-installer/updater for RetroArch gaming

Solved my own issue:

Control question!

I'm having trouble mapping my joypad to button I on the PC Engine controller. At first I thought it was because I was being lazy and mapped ALL my extra buttons to A or B (I am using a USB NES controller clone) but I went in today and set all my unused button mappings to nul and it still doesn't work. Weirdly, II maps to B on my controller normally, as you might expect. Also while pressing A on my controller doesn't seem to trigger any input in the games, holding A and pressing B pauses them, universally. I only played an actual PC Engine for like an hour at Toys R Us in the 90s so I have no idea if this is expected behavior (Run seems to share the start mapping in retroarch and works normally).

Is anyone else messing with PC Engine games who might have an answer? The games themselves run just fine so I'm thinking this is an ID-10T problem on my part.

PS: you can make it surprisingly far in 1943 Kai using nothing but avoidance and super weapons, as it turns out. You can pretend you're a pacifist and God is protecting you from all the cowardly pilots who resort to violence instead of peace and love.

It turns out that for whatever reason Mednafen uses either your X or Y keymap for Button I and your B keymap for button II. Off the top of my head I want to say I fixed it by setting A on my nes pad to fire Y and B to fire B. That produces a control scheme that can play alien crush (and it's more metal cousin Devil's Crush) so I am happy with it.

I hope this is useful to anyone else who was as useless with this setup as me.

Solved my own issue:

It turns out that for whatever reason Mednafen uses either your X or Y keymap for Button I and your B keymap for button II. Off the top of my head I want to say I fixed it by setting A on my nes pad to fire Y and B to fire B. That produces a control scheme that can play alien crush (and it's more metal cousin Devil's Crush) so I am happy with it.

I hope this is useful to anyone else who was as useless with this setup as me.

I am sure this will be helpful! Would you mind to post the corresponding lines from your retroarch.cfg here?

BTW: I am still having the black screen issues with the new Raspbian image as described above. Any ideas?

I am having trouble with the audio while trying to play snes games. From what i understand most everyone uses it flawlessly.

I have an hdmi plugged in but no audio will come out. i used the command

sudo amixer cset numid=3 2

but this made the snes games freeze up with an occasional bleep from the audio. i tried changing the audio drivers in retroarch.cfg but it didnt change anything.

if i change back to

sudo amixer cset numid=3 0

then plug in headphones the game plays perfectly but there is a static sound on the headphones. i also tried changing the retroarch.cfg to include

audio_out_rate=44100
audio_driver=sdl

i tried overclocking to the turbo setting and the audio plays almost perfectly with the occasional static. is a little static normal? I am a little uneasy about leaving my RPi on the turbo, but i dont know what else to try. any suggestions? I am a complete noob to linux so please keep that in mind in your response

Does the retro arch .cfg file need to be changed to support 2 players?

You can have a look at the function "enableGameconSnes" (https://github.com/petrockblog/RetroPie ... p.sh#L1130) - that configuration works for me.

After running the installing gameconSnes and enabeling this via the retroarch setup menu- 2 players on NES works. This configuration is using two NES to USB adapters plugged into a hub, as well as having the joystick configuration saved to /etc/retroarch.cfg

Thanks petrockblog!

I am having trouble with the audio while trying to play snes games. From what i understand most everyone uses it flawlessly.

I have an hdmi plugged in but no audio will come out. i used the command

sudo amixer cset numid=3 2

but this made the snes games freeze up with an occasional bleep from the audio. i tried changing the audio drivers in retroarch.cfg but it didnt change anything.

if i change back to

sudo amixer cset numid=3 0

then plug in headphones the game plays perfectly but there is a static sound on the headphones. i also tried changing the retroarch.cfg to include

audio_out_rate=44100
audio_driver=sdl

i tried overclocking to the turbo setting and the audio plays almost perfectly with the occasional static. is a little static normal? I am a little uneasy about leaving my RPi on the turbo, but i dont know what else to try. any suggestions? I am a complete noob to linux so please keep that in mind in your response

PulseAudio comes pre-installed with the latest Raspbian image and it slows down the system a lot (at least in combination with the emulators installed by the RetroPie script). I added the removal of PulseAudio to the RetroPie script as a quick fix, even though there might be a more elegant way so solve this. The additional line in the script is

Code: Select all

apt-get remove -y pulseaudio

I am still having the black screen issue for DGEN, GnGeo, and ScumVM with the new Raspbian image.

I have a question about the audio, it might have answerd before in this thread but didn't find it.

I only use the NES emulation from this pack, and the audio works perfect. Using the SDL and 44100 thing.
The issue is, if its can be called issue..

When i have it connected to my TV (red/white cabel) i have to turn up my TV ALOT till i can hear the audio, and when i go back to TV and have forgott to turn down the audio i almost get def (well not exacly but its loud). I have tried to connect it to my reciever and its the same there. Usually when i watch blu-ray or TV i have the volume around 7-8, but when the RPi is connected i have to turn it up to around 22-25. and when closing down the RPi i think you can guess what happens.

Does this have to do with my settings or is it something else?

As i said the audio works perfect but the volume have to be high on the TV or the reciever to be abel to hear anything.

Based on the SNESDev-RPi code, what are the GPIO pins that could be used to simulate a keyboard press to bring emulationstation back to the ROMs menu?

I saw this done here http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=pl ... lg-g4geSWY
but there are no details on this. I'm imagining that the SNESDEV-RPi already has details of how to do this but I can't find it. Any help?

Based on the SNESDev-RPi code, what are the GPIO pins that could be used to simulate a keyboard press to bring emulationstation back to the ROMs menu?

ES will return once the emulator terminates. You can make RetroArch quit in software by assigning an "exit" joystick button (I believe there's some detail on the RetroPie wiki about that) or somehow simulating an Escape key press. You could also just have a script force-kill any instances of RetroArch.

Sorry I can't be of more help than that.

Based on the SNESDev-RPi code, what are the GPIO pins that could be used to simulate a keyboard press to bring emulationstation back to the ROMs menu?

ES will return once the emulator terminates. You can make RetroArch quit in software by assigning an "exit" joystick button (I believe there's some detail on the RetroPie wiki about that) or somehow simulating an Escape key press. You could also just have a script force-kill any instances of RetroArch.

Sorry I can't be of more help than that.

Thanks for the response Aloshi and for ES. As I'm working with NES controllers I don't have any spare buttons to dedicate to exiting back to ES with the controller, so I was wondering how that's done with the SNESDEV-RPi code and the RPi GPIO pins (I believe this simulates an escape key).

Based on the SNESDev-RPi code, what are the GPIO pins that could be used to simulate a keyboard press to bring emulationstation back to the ROMs menu?

I saw this done here http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=pl ... lg-g4geSWY
but there are no details on this. I'm imagining that the SNESDEV-RPi already has details of how to do this but I can't find it. Any help?

I just uploaded a demo video for the RetroPie GPIO adapter that also shows the button with a back/ESC function. Details to the GPIO adapter can be found at http://petrockblog.wordpress.com/2012/1 ... o-adapter/. SNESDev is used in the video for polling the button. It can be installed with the RetroPie Setup script and the current version of SNESDev can be found here. You can set SNESDev to poll the pads, the button, or both by calling SNEADev with additional argument 1, 2, or 3:

Code: Select all

// argv[1]==1 poll controllers only
      // argv[1]==2 poll button only
      // argv[1]==3 poll controllers and button

Based on the SNESDev-RPi code, what are the GPIO pins that could be used to simulate a keyboard press to bring emulationstation back to the ROMs menu?

I saw this done here http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=pl ... lg-g4geSWY
but there are no details on this. I'm imagining that the SNESDEV-RPi already has details of how to do this but I can't find it. Any help?

I just uploaded a demo video for the RetroPie GPIO adapter that also shows the button with a back/ESC function. Details to the GPIO adapter can be found at http://petrockblog.wordpress.com/2012/1 ... o-adapter/. SNESDev is used in the video for polling the button. It can be installed with the RetroPie Setup script and the current version of SNESDev can be found here. You can set SNESDev to poll the pads, the button, or both by calling SNEADev with additional argument 1, 2, or 3:

Code: Select all

// argv[1]==1 poll controllers only
      // argv[1]==2 poll button only
      // argv[1]==3 poll controllers and button

That's exactly what I was looking for! I see on your blog page that GPIO P11 is for the button. I will try this out. Is argv[1]==3 the default config for SNESDEV? If not, could you detail how to change the conifg to 3?

jeb92 wrote:
I am having trouble with the audio while trying to play snes games. From what i understand most everyone uses it flawlessly.

I have an hdmi plugged in but no audio will come out. i used the command

sudo amixer cset numid=3 2

but this made the snes games freeze up with an occasional bleep from the audio. i tried changing the audio drivers in retroarch.cfg but it didnt change anything.

if i change back to

sudo amixer cset numid=3 0

then plug in headphones the game plays perfectly but there is a static sound on the headphones. i also tried changing the retroarch.cfg to include

audio_out_rate=44100
audio_driver=sdl

i tried overclocking to the turbo setting and the audio plays almost perfectly with the occasional static. is a little static normal? I am a little uneasy about leaving my RPi on the turbo, but i dont know what else to try. any suggestions? I am a complete noob to linux so please keep that in mind in your response

PulseAudio comes pre-installed with the latest Raspbian image and it slows down the system a lot (at least in combination with the emulators installed by the RetroPie script). I added the removal of PulseAudio to the RetroPie script as a quick fix, even though there might be a more elegant way so solve this. The additional line in the script is
CODE: SELECT ALL
apt-get remove -y pulseaudio

i removed PulseAudio and dropped the overclock back down to 900 and everything seems to be working great. Thanks!

Two questions

Firstly, would this controller work with RetroPie?

Secondly, whenever I try and play Master System games (NES and GB games aren't affected) the screen flashes constantly; I'm not sure what would cause this and what I can do about it (?)

Two questions

Firstly, would this controller work with RetroPie?

Secondly, whenever I try and play Master System games (NES and GB games aren't affected) the screen flashes constantly; I'm not sure what would cause this and what I can do about it (?)

I do not have this pad, but as long as the pad presents itself as a "normal" USB gamepad it should work with the Pi.

I also observe the flashing behaviour since I did an installation with a recent fresh Raspbian image and, until now, I do not know how to cope with the flashing either.

If you are interested in connecting NES or SNES controllers o the RPi GPIO pins you might want to have a look at the RetroPie GPIO Adapter!

It is a dedicated GPIO adapter for the Raspberry Pi that allows an easy and safe connection of up to two NES or SNES controllers.

For those of you that are interested in connecting Nintendo controllers to the Pi I have uploaded a video that demonstrates the RetroPie GPIO Adapter in action. You can find it at http://petrockblog.wordpress.com/2012/1 ... o-adapter/.

Any recent Amiga UAE4All updates?

That's exactly what I was looking for! I see on your blog page that GPIO P11 is for the button. I will try this out. Is argv[1]==3 the default config for SNESDEV? If not, could you detail how to change the conifg to 3?

Yes, the default polls the gamepads and the button. So, calling SNESDev without any argument or with

Code: Select all

SNESDev 3

leads to the same result.

Solved my own issue:

It turns out that for whatever reason Mednafen uses either your X or Y keymap for Button I and your B keymap for button II. Off the top of my head I want to say I fixed it by setting A on my nes pad to fire Y and B to fire B. That produces a control scheme that can play alien crush (and it's more metal cousin Devil's Crush) so I am happy with it.

I hope this is useful to anyone else who was as useless with this setup as me.

I am sure this will be helpful! Would you mind to post the corresponding lines from your retroarch.cfg here?

BTW: I am still having the black screen issues with the new Raspbian image as described above. Any ideas?

My Keymaps are:
input_player1_a_btn = "1"
input_player1_b_btn = "2"
input_player1_y_btn = "1"
input_player1_x_btn = "2"
input_player1_start_btn = "9"
input_player1_select_btn = "8"
input_player1_l_btn = "nul"
input_player1_r_btn = "nul"
input_player1_left_axis = "-0"
input_player1_up_axis = "-1"
input_player1_right_axis = "+0"
input_player1_down_axis = "+1"
# input_player1_left_btn =
# input_player1_right_btn =
# input_player1_up_btn =
# input_player1_down_btn =
input_player1_l2_btn = "nul"
input_player1_r2_btn = "nul"
input_player1_l3_btn = "nul"
input_player1_r3_btn = "nul"

Keeping in mind of course that this is for the USB NES controller clone here: http://www.amazon.com/Classic-USB-NES-Controller-PC/dp/B002YVD3KM/ref=pd_sim_vg_1/183-6587334-8304717. This config should let you play Gameboy, Gamegear, Master System, NES, and PCE games with the expected input. I worried that Y and A would be used for the PCE turbo sliders but this does not seem to be the case (perhaps the emulator disables them in favor of emulator turbo?). Also dig the wackiness of how the buttons jump to 8 and 9- even counting the D-pad, which registers as a 2-sensor axial input, there aren't 9 buttons on here which makes me think this controller shares its guts with another more complicated model.

Sorry for yet another question so soon. I've purchased the controller I mentioned up there ^ ^
and I'm not trying to configure it, but everything's so confusing I wondered if someone could perhaps walk me through this in very simple terms

I've run the command to configure the controller and it's produced the following results. I don't have an L3 or R3 button, so I just pressed a different button instead.
I'm worried by the fact every d-pad button produces the same value, what does this mean?

If everything there is as it should be, what's the easiest way to create a new / override the existing config file? The RetroPie wiki has one method

Code: Select all

./retroarch-joyconfig -o /etc/retroarch.cfg

but that produced a file (which I've stupidly since deleted) which, when opened, looked nothing like the original config file. When I try to run a game the controller doesn't work, so I'm assuming it hasn't altered the original config file either.
I was hoping I could copy and paste the above results into the original config file, but there's so much writing and commands (and lots of stuff in brackets and square brackets) etc that I'm scared to change anything.

Thank you in advance for your patience

Also, the controller works fine with Emulationstation (can go all directions and the other buttons work) after it was configured it when plugging the controller in for the first time

Sorry for yet another question so soon. I've purchased the controller I mentioned up there ^ ^
and I'm not trying to configure it, but everything's so confusing I wondered if someone could perhaps walk me through this in very simple terms

I've run the command to configure the controller and it's produced the following results. I don't have an L3 or R3 button, so I just pressed a different button instead.
I'm worried by the fact every d-pad button produces the same value, what does this mean?

If everything there is as it should be, what's the easiest way to create a new / override the existing config file? The RetroPie wiki has one method

Code: Select all

./retroarch-joyconfig -o /etc/retroarch.cfg

but that produced a file (which I've stupidly since deleted) which, when opened, looked nothing like the original config file. When I try to run a game the controller doesn't work, so I'm assuming it hasn't altered the original config file either.
I was hoping I could copy and paste the above results into the original config file, but there's so much writing and commands (and lots of stuff in brackets and square brackets) etc that I'm scared to change anything.

Thank you in advance for your patience

Your "real" config file is a hidden file called .retroarch.cfg in your home/pi directory (or whatever user account you are using). You want to open that, find joypad input, and paste your joyconfig output over the default joypad settings.

And your d-pad settings look okay. Left/right should be +/- on one axis number, likewise with up/down. The big crazy number next to that is just the analog stick tilt retroarch reads a button press as (probably the highest value that an analog stick can incline to).

Thank you ! Everything looks configured now.

I have another problem though, when I go to play any game of any console, the game now runs extremely slowly, so much so that with certain consoles (atari 2600 & game gear) the pi locks up after less than a minute

Thank you ! Everything looks configured now.

I have another problem though, when I go to play any game of any console, the game now runs extremely slowly, so much so that with certain consoles (atari 2600 & game gear) the pi locks up after less than a minute

Some questions:
-are you using an overclock? I am using the highest overclock that does NOT use overvolting and it works okay. I think it's "modest?"
-Have you changed your memory split? 128/128 is probably enough.
-are you running from x? most retroarch stuff will work better if you launch from the command line w/o desktop.
-have you set any other custom prefs, such as audio sample rate, that might burden the system?

Any of these could be the culprit.

Thank you ! Everything looks configured now.

I have another problem though, when I go to play any game of any console, the game now runs extremely slowly, so much so that with certain consoles (atari 2600 & game gear) the pi locks up after less than a minute

Some questions:
-are you using an overclock? I am using the highest overclock that does NOT use overvolting and it works okay. I think it's "modest?"
-Have you changed your memory split? 128/128 is probably enough.
-are you running from x? most retroarch stuff will work better if you launch from the command line w/o desktop.
-have you set any other custom prefs, such as audio sample rate, that might burden the system?

Any of these could be the culprit.

Thank you for the reply Unfortunately I do indeed have it overclocked on "modest", 128/128 split and I'm running from the command line (emulationstation) with no custom preferences (I wouldn't know how to )

Is there such thing as a usb gamepad being too powerful for the Pi ? I've got the controller running from the powered usb hub with only a keyboard attached and nothing else attached to the Pi's other usb port.

Thank you for the reply Unfortunately I do indeed have it overclocked on "modest", 128/128 split and I'm running from the command line (emulationstation) with no custom preferences (I wouldn't know how to )

Is there such thing as a usb gamepad being too powerful for the Pi ? I've got the controller running from the powered usb hub with only a keyboard attached and nothing else attached to the Pi's other usb port.

Do you maybe have PulseAudio installed? Try

Code: Select all

sudo apt-get -y remove pulseaudio

Does this help?