Issues with multiple controllers and audio

deranged

Heya,

Firstly thank you for the efforts that devs and others are doing to improve this system. Really appreciate it!

DISCLAIMER: Wall of text incoming! I try to be as precise as I can be so I offer more than likely unnecessary information here but bare with me :)

I’m running following setup:

Raspberry Pi 4 4bg with usb ssd 120gb with full UASP support.

Batocera version is 33. I have done clean install (actually twice now) as the update from 32 to 33 completely borked my system.

I switch usb ssds between Batocera v33 and Libreelec 10.0.1 installations as I don’t like the dual boot offered by pinn etc.

Therefore I connect the pi to my Sony XH95 tv via hdmi0 but I also have hdmi1 connected to my audio system as I need to output lossless audio to my avr (no hdr/truehd/dts ma passthrough possible as my avr only has hdmi 1.4) when running Libreelec (which can easily output video via hdmi0 and audio via hdmi1). I switch usb ssd each one dedicated to Batocera and Libreelec.

I’m using standard raspberry pi power brick sold by the pihut.

Controllers I use are as follows:

8BitDo wireless receiver paired with 8BitDo SN30 pro controller
couple of old DE-9/DB-9 C64 era joysticks. These are connected via JAKADAPTER (Stelladapter compatible) dual usb dongle that is recognized by Batocera after connecting the dongle. These should work in almost every linux distributions.
PS4 Dual Shock controller connected via RPI blue-tooth
Wireless keyboard and mouse, legacy stuff from Acer mini pc era, connected via separate 2.4ghz usb dongle

Now to the issues:

Occasional audio drops

I have set my audio in the Batocera’s System Settings like this:

Audio output: VC4-HDMI-0DIGITAL STEREO (IEC958)
Audio profile: VC4-HDMI-0DIGITAL STEREO (IEC958) OUTPUT

This seems to start to work almost always after I set these options. None other audio setting combination works.

When just idling in the main home screen listening front-end music sometimes audio just drops and it’s really hard to get audio back. Sometimes when starting multiple roms I get sound from roms or when exiting rom and returning back to game list view or going back to main screen. Audio just starts to work after being mute for awhile. I haven’t noticed a single pattern which could help me to identify the issue.

I have also tried to run Batocera without connecting the second hdmi to my AVR but that has no effect at all. I wonder if Batocera has same kind of feature that Libreelec has (getedid create) which creates nice “overrides” that will always map the correct hdmi output to correct system. IIRC Batocera is build on top of Libreelec or have I misunderstood something terribly wrong.

Audio may come back alive by it self after awhile or not and sometimes after changing the source of incoming signal from my TV ie. changing TV’s input to TV broadcast and then TV’s input back to the hdmi which Batocera/Rpi is occupying.

I have one error message in dmesg which might be related to this issue:
hdmi-audio-codec hdmi-audio-codec.3.auto: ASoC: error at snd_soc_dai_startup on i2s-hifi: -19

This error message appear few times but I have no idea if it’s related or not.

Issues with joysticks and controllers

I use to have everything working just fine but for some reason I can get only my controllers to work one at the time (excluding keyboard/mouse) meaning if I connect 8BitDo controller it works if it’s the only controller connected. If I connect my DE-9 joystick(s) by connecting JAKADAPTER via usb (does not matter if it’s usb 2 or 3 port, every available port has been tested) every controller stops from working. Instantly when I disconnect either one, 8BitDo or JAKADAPTER, the one that’s still connected starts to work normally. This happens also if by default JAKADAPTER is connected with or without the DE-9 sticks and then I connected 8BitDo wireless receiver and pair my 8BitDo SN30 Pro, no inputs are received by ES then either.

Batocera sees my controllers when they are connected but no input is received by ES when trying to configure the controllers. I have configured my controllers when they are connected solo so they work when they are the only controller connected to the system.

evtest sees every connected joystick/controller and logs every action done via those controllers even when every controller is connected at the same time. So therefore ES screws something up.

Keyboard and mouse seem to work always no matter what controller setting I’m currently trying.

More issues with joysticks

I cannot seem to find anyway to setup my DE-9 joysticks so they work with Atari ST, Amiga500 or C64 roms. I would like to set my old schools joysticks to ports 1 and 2 and 8BitDo and DS 4 controllers could occupy ports 3 and 4 or what ever.

Is physical controller mapping per core per port even possible? I cannot stand to use normal “new age” controllers when playing old school computer games as they lack the feel of digital micro switches.

I tried (when my joysticks and controllers were working together for a while) to map ports manually via Controller & Bluetooth Settings view by setting P1’s controller to JAKADAPTER 0 and P2’s controller to JAKADAPTER 1 but I cannot start any of my roms as es_launch_stderr.log reports that start or some other button bind is missing. Well obviously when those old school joysticks have only 1 button.

I managed to get ports mapped somewhat okay’ishly to libretro/vice x64 core by visiting Retroarch’s settings menu and adjusting input’s for ports 1, 2 and 3. Of course Batocera will override these right after I start another rom so no help there.

Also it seems impossible to configure controllers in ES if controller has only one button and one would like to map that button to B. Button A mapping cannot be skipped so I cannot use my DE-9 joysticks to start any game within ES unless I manually change the button bind via ssh etc.

Could there be some kind of support for advanced users that could prevent Batocera from overriding those Retroarch settings? There are many settings I need to change and I have not found anyway to override the Batocera’s overrides even though there are few guides how that should be possible.

Problems with keyboard keybinds

Keyboard can be configured easily via ES’s controllers configuration. Everything works in ES but when entering let’s say C64 games the previously mapped keyboard hotkey does nothing at all. Even if A, B, X, and Y is mapped to some keys they wont work as Batocera persistently overrides those and I cannot really changes those according to wiki entry (there’s a mention that if those preset keybinds are overridden any usage of controllers are not possible anymore within games).

Why anyone would even map those buttons in ES for keyboards when they does not affect anything else but ES? Seems a bit ridiculous to me but I might be a bit on the stupid side.

Also how can I change the keyboard settings so pressing ESC does not instantly quit Reatroarch? Or how can I change keybinds permanently for load state, save state, save state slot + and -, reset game, pause game etc. that are available within the Retroarch’s settings area?

Also I need to remove unused and unnecessary keyboard keybinds but I cannot do that via RA settings views as they are overridden.

I do understand that Batocera in mainly made for not so advanced users in mind but at the same time disabling more advanced use cases seems really counter intuitive as those options would and should be opt-in features as usual. That way Batocera would not be limited only for “console” gaming but would support old computers also in more profound way. I find it hard to believe that I’m the only one that likes Batocera’s cleanliness and performance (which is awesome especially with ssd) and wants to use multiple controllers with different cores and adjust settings to their liking.

Anyways, if anyone has any ideas how to sort these issues or point me forward to some even obscure solution, for that I would truly really appreciate for your time :)

Where are the “important” system logs located so I could dig in deeper as ES logs reveals nothing as usual.

P.S

I have considered going back to RetroPie but that time is not yet until there is no stone left to turn :)

Edit: Fixed typos and added more clarity.

Atari

When I had audio dropping issues, I found that it was because of the USB I was using to boot Batocera from. After buying a new Sandisk one and flashing to it, my audio cutting problems suddenly disappeared.

Batocera is not built on top of LibreELEC, it is its own system created using buildroot. Basically, you can consider it its own distribution.

Certain arcade encoder cause issues with other joysticks when connected. It is recommended only to use the ones Batocera itself has been tested to work well with: https://wiki.batocera.org/supported_controllers Unless you’d be willing to debug with the team to get it fixed. Uploading the error log in an issue report would be one step towards this.

Also, absolutely hilarious you mention the single-button binding problem. I’ve already reported an issue about this exact situation, you might want to add your information to it here: https://github.com/batocera-linux/batocera-emulationstation/issues/1103

C64 might be using the keyboard as the input itself because it is a computer system. Therefore, RetroArch would disable its hotkeys unless you don’t use Game Focus mode. Being able to configure hotkeys in Batocera is a long-standing feature request, but no one has tried implementing it yet. That being said, if you make custom RetroArch settings in batocera.conf then it should work fine, not sure why it wouldn’t be for you. Do you maybe have a core override loaded for that system? You’re very much meant to be able to just use RetroArch’s configuration if you prefer that.

deranged

Atari Thank you for you time :)

My bad about that assumption where Batocera was based on. I stand corrected.

Issues about controllers, as I mentioned, did not start at first. They were actually working fine but kinda deteriorated to the point where I’m currently (without any log entry about possible errors). I use to be able to use any of my controllers/joysticks together without issues but not anymore. That’s part of the reason why I asked where can I find crucial log files as, like I mentioned, /userdata/system/logs does not hold any really useful information. I have only tried dmesg for now but it does not seem to reveal anything related to the JAKADAPTER nor 8BitDo controller for that matter when I connect/disconnect them. Like I said, system sees those controllers just fine via evtest I ran multiple times, ES just does not detect any inputs from them when they are connected at the same time. ES actually shows notification when new controller is connected or disconnected but no input is detected anymore when 2 or more controllers are connected simultaneously.

The controllers does not seem to be working even when 8BitDo and PS dual Shock 4 is connected at the same time also. I think I’m gonna do yet another clean install but I cannot really unfortunately go back to SD cards (after been spoiled with SSD) as SD’s are slow AF compared to SSD’s so it seems that audio issues will remain unless clean install can help in that one too :)

I will add information to the GH issue for sure, thanks for pointing that out to me.

I wonder how RA works with the keyboard hotkeys for C64 when user sets them up via Retroarch’s Settings area. If I set my desired hotkeys from there I can use keyboard just fine without hotkeys interfering until I hold my defined hotkey which activates every other defined hotkeys. It works perfectly that way but of course theses settings gets nuked automatically. Also the port order per core per controller can only be overcome within Retroarch’s Settings area. RetroPie has retropie-joystick-selection script available but that does not realyl help here, just pointing out that it’s an issue other distros are having also. Kodi alpha 20 is the only one with it’s retroplayer’s player manager that has a solution to it as far a I know.

I do have set core remaps but not core overrides. I tried to add global.retroarch settings to batocera.conf but none of my roms would start at all regardless of system. Then I tried to define those settings based on systems names so they would not be global but none of my settings worked at all. I need to try this approach again as it should have worked. I tried to keep my Retroarch settings in batocera.conf to be very simple to test them out how they behave but nothing worked. I must have screwed up something then (or I tried to add settings that would not work in the first place) even though it’s very simple thing to do :)

Unfortunately es_ prefixed logs wont really tell anything related to my problems as those logs does not contain any errors. I found of course setting in ES for log level but have not been able to understand how that log level would behave and which log file it should populate etc.

Any pointers? I would love to debug and try to find solutions on my own that’s why I’m here. I don’t really want to be spoon fed as I would only like to be pointed to right direction, then I could report back to here and to GH etc.

Anyways, big thank you for you time and advises so far, I really appreciate that!

Atari

deranged The error logs would be available from Batocera’s support file. There’s no such thing as “no logs”, as even logs detailing just what happened to the system or how ES is configured is valuable information. Better than just guessing what went wrong, at least. Please read the wiki on instructions as to how to get this file.

Batocera has no tangible difference in speed between SSDs and SD cards. Emulators themselves, for the older systems at least, make no difference as they load their data into RAM. Disc-based systems usually had read/write speeds slower than that of USB 2.0 devices, of which SD cards are typically faster than. I was specifically referring to faulty USB drives that have the audio cutting out issue.

The way Batocera works is that it has a configgen which generators the correct configuration files based on your user configuration in the menus to launch the emulators correctly. These configgens have been programmed in such a way that if you are intentionally using core overrides then the core overrides take priority over Batocera’s configgen.

Remap files are not core overrides. This is most likely just user error. Please read through the wiki and try it again.

deranged

Hey,

Like I said before I have not set any core overrides only remap for one core (libretro-vice).

i have read the wiki through multiple times already and for some reason the problems persists with controllers/joysticks.

Anyways, i moved back to RetroPie and got it working the way I wanted quite easily and fast.

Anyways, highly appreciate the support you are providing!

So long,

-D

Atari

deranged I don’t believe libretro-vice uses remaps. Like, at all. Its controls are handled entirely in its core options, which means a core override would be required. Saving a remap file in this instance would do nothing.