Just a quick question to prove to myself that I am not losing my sanity. I’ve googled and not found anything useful, so I figured I would just ask. I have two identical homemade gamepads that work perfectly in emulation station, and I have configurations for the controllers setup in Mame4All as well. When I fire up a mame emulator (Mame4All or lr-FBA for example) I see different behaviors depending on which game I play. For instance..

Gauntlet (2 or 4 player)/ X-Men (2 or 4 player)

The multiple controllers work just fine. No issues.

Galaga/Pac-Man

I can insert coins and hit the 2 player start button and begin a 2 player game. Player 1 works fine, but when it is player 2’s turn they must user player 1’s controller. The second controller does nothing. While I would like player 2 to be able to use the second controller, my brain is telling me that since the stand-up arcade versions of Galaga/Pac-Man etc. only had a single joystick and set of buttons that is all the game is capable of supporting. I could probably try to track down and acquire a table-top version of some of the ROMs that had two sets of controllers and see if that works, but then I have a sneaky suspicion that my issue would become Player 2’s controller works but they have to play with the game upside down on my TV. Anyway for the plain old stand up versions of most games I am thinking there is no way around both players having to share a controller.

Is my logic correct, or is there something painfully obvious that I am missing somewhere that would allow me to accomplish this (each player using a separate controller)?

Thanks for any input.