ControlBlock unresponsive, thumbnail of rainbow in screen

[lasergecko]

I am having all kinds of issues with my
ControlBlock. Sometimes, it works in
EmulationStation, but most often, not or it’s
extremely sketchy. It does show that it sees the
drivers in ES and RetroArch.

I only have P1 joystick, SW1, SW2, and two other
buttons hooked up right now. (I’ve moved them
between Start/Coin and A/B.) If I enter the UI
config in ES (by using a USB controller), it
immediately registers some button as UP, then goes
to the next one. Last night, it was automatically
loading Adventure on the 2600 emulator.

Is there a “standard layout” for the inputs? If
you’re using it in arcade mode, where should I
wire the Select and Start buttons? How does Start,
Coin, A, and B figure into the RetroArch config?

I even ran the RetroArch controller controller
setup and it registered the inputs, but when I
finally managed to get an NES game loaded, no
response at all.

I have beeped out all of the inputs (with it
powered down) and there are no solder bridges. The
only thing I do not know is whether the Ground is
shared between P1 and P2. (I assume it is.) If
not, then that might be my problem.

Everything was fine before I added the
ControlBlock. So, I’m really stumped now. I’ve had
the joysticks and buttons for a week, but it’s
been a week of nothing but frustration.

[petrockblog]

P1 and P1 share the same Ground, so that is perfectly ok. My first guess is that the service „SNESDev“ is running in the background – it is the driver for the RetroPie GPIO Adapter and (unfortunately) uses some of the GPIO pins that the control block service is also using.
You can check if the service is installed with the command “service —status-all“.

So that might interfere with each other. You can uninstall the SNESDev service, e.g., either with the RetroPie-Setup Script, with the makefile that comes with the SNESDev-Rpi repository (https://github.com/petrockblog/SNESDev-RPi/blob/master/README.md#uninstalling-snesdev-service), or – if you are familiar with the command line and Linux – directly from the console.

[lasergecko]

There is something odd happening that might be the cause of it.

There is a small flashing graphic in the top right of the screen. It’s a thumbnail of the rainbow screen that appears when you boot. Every time it fades up and down, the Pause function activates.

I checked all of the ControlBlock inputs with jstest and they work fine. I even got to play a couple of games tonight, but it’s impossible with the constant pausing.

[petrockblog]

Ah, I see. I had the same problem. The rainbow in the top right corner means that the power that reaches the RPi is too weak: http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=82373.
When I first encountered that problem myself, I did not think about this, because I did not have this problem without the ControlBlock. However, the power switch functionality of the ControlBlock leads to a tiny voltage drop which seems to just lead to a critical voltage when using certain combinations of power supplies and USB cables.
It took me some time to find that out. When I changed to a better USB cable (usually this means a thicker, bit more expensive one: more copper, less resistance), the problems vanished immediately.
So, before everything else: Change to another USB cable and/or power supply so that the rainbow does not appear in the top right of your screen.

[lasergecko]

Thanks for the help. I dug around and found this, too:

http://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p=582098#p582098

While I haven’t had a chance to test it yet, I think the combination of the USB cable and the LED switch I used must be dropping the current enough to cause hassles. It ran for quite awhile with just the ControlBlock on top and with the Apple iPad USB charger (2.1A), but now it’s right on the edge of usability.

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