Hi

Ive been trying to get this to work for hours now, and multiple searches doesnt really get me very far.

Ive built myself a bartop arcade and put retropie on it, on top of raspbian.
Installed Adafruit to map my joystick + 9 buttons to keypresses
Got the emulators = roms to work, no issues

The emulationstation works fine, I was able to configure successfully the joystick and buttons first time
mame is working fine, all buttons mapped too
but neither of these use retroarch

now when I try and use snes or megadrive roms, they cant be controlled, or can, but some buttons are mapped, and some are not, and with the wrong function

Joystick, up, left, right, down = always fine!
I have 6 buttons, A,B,C, X,Y,Z
and then 3 more buttons for start, select, and exit emulator
Keyboard equivalent (tested with Adafruit and successful)
A= Enter
B= B
C= C
X= X
Y= Y
Z= Z
start button= 1
select button= 2
exit= 3

My retroarch config file looks like this:

input_player1_joypad_index = 3
(i think this forces keyboard, but other values dont seem to work anyway)

input_player1_b = b
input_player1_a = enter
input_player1_y = y
input_player1_x = x
input_player1_l = c
input_player1_r = z
input_player1_start = 1
input_player1_select = 2
input_exit_button= 3

The above doesnt work whether i define it in the /opt/retropie/configs/all, or the /opt/retropie/configs/snes or megadrive directories
In fact, If I put it in the ‘all’ directry, everythings stops working altogether and I cant even use a keyboard to escape

Ive also tried hitting F1 in game and getting a menu where I can configure controls. but when I try that, it just waits for a keypress from somewhere forever (until I hit Enter to skip)

The problem seems to be with retroarch, but I cant quite figure it out?

Any ideas? Apologies for the long post!

Help much appreciated :)