Controller problem, but not like the others I'm seeing posts for.

[texitytex]

What I have so far…

Raspberry Pi 2 Model B
Retropie 2.6
Cideko Air Keyboard Conqueror controller

So before Easter Sunday I’ve been using an early Raspberry Pi (original) No problems whatsoever apart from being sluggish on higher-end systems such as N64 and PSX.

I upgraded on a whim to Pi 2.

The only problem I’ve had so far, is a particularly annoying one. After every reboot, the initial “Welcome” config screen appears saying, “No Gamepads Detected Hold A button on your device to configure it. Press F4 to quit at any time.
To be clear here, these are the basic controller configurations that allow easy controller based navigation through Emulation Station.
Every time, I go through the configuration up down left right b, a, start, select, left, right… blah blah blah…
Everything works fine. I can start games, back out of games, play them correctly as the retroarch controller mappings work just fine, but the second I reboot… I lose my Emulation Station mappings.

So here’s something I’ve noticed through out my many… many… many reboots to test various fixes and tweaks.
The dongle for this particular controller, displays a blue light when it’s receiving from the controller. During boot, and until about 5-10 seconds after the “Welcome” screen I described earlier is displayed the light is solid blue, no matter what buttons are pressed.
To me it feels like the USB ports are not actually initializing in time for whatever auto-detection features are used to sniff a controller before starting this mapping script. Perhaps bumping the USB driver loading priority?

Does anyone have any ideas on this one? The obvious answer would be to use a different controller, but this particular one incorporates a Mouse, Keyboard, and for all intents and purposes, a PS1 controller into one device and a single dongle.

What kills me is, it still works just fine on my old Pi.

Any thoughts?

[herbfargus]

That is rather odd. This is a long shot but when I made manual edits to metadata, I had to select quit emulationstation from the emulation station menu for it to write the changes (not restart or shutdown system), perhaps its the same for your controller, its worth a try.

[texitytex]

Ya know, I’m not 100%, but I’m pretty sure I tried that. It’s been a long night…
I’ll definitely give that a shot, but as I said, I’m like 90% positive I’ve done that at least once.

I still can’t move my thoughts away from the timing of the USB initialization.

[Floob]

Does this suggestion help?

PS3 bluetooth controller, correct method for retropie 2.3?

You may want to keep an eye on the datestamp and contents of this file, as this is what should hold your controller setup for ES.
/home/pi/.emulationstation/es_input.cfg

[texitytex]

Excellent!
Thank you Floob, I believe that will do exactly what I’m asking. Instead of escalate the USB initialization, Pause the ES load.

This looks like it’s the perfect solution. I’m going to SSH into it now and have it ready for me when I get home.

[texitytex]

First, I would like to thank you guys. herbfargus and floob, your help was much appreciated. floob the post you pointed me to did the job just perfectly. I timed the sleep just perfectly so that as soon as the controller is ready ES loads up. The wife and I were able to play Mario Kart 64 tonight, and even a little smash bros.

This is pretty much perfect. Now I can see to it that my daughter will be classically trained in gaming.

-Tex

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