Frustration setting up RetroPie- Keyboard and gamepads not recognized

[josephemorgan91]

Hey guys, I really appreciate that there’s such a strong forum here to help each other out :)

I’ve been trying to get RetroPie set up for a while now, but between work and school and whatnot I haven’t been able to devote my full attention to it… Finally today I had some time to dive in.

I already had Raspbian running and set up in a way that I was satisfied with, so I decided to install RetroPie on top of it as documented here. I selected the binary-based installation after cloning from github, left everything as it was, and then went from there. After getting everything finished, I tried to launch emulationstation… but every time I do, I get an error saying”Welcome: no gamepads detected, hold a button on your device to configure it, press F4 to quit at any time.” From that point, my keyboard is not recognized at all. I can’t exit that screen, can’t do anything.

The first thing I tried was to launch retropie-setup and register a gamepad that I have with retroarch. It worked perfectly, the gamepad was recognized, but still when I launch emulationstation it won’t recognize it, or my keyboard. I’m not sure what to do.

One interesting thing that I noticed is that when emulationstation is launched with sudo, even though it gives me an error message, it allows me to press okay to quit, and my keyboard is recognized. This makes me think that emulationstation isn’t being run with the right permissions, or that my user isn’t a member of the correct groups. I’m not running anything logged in as pi, but as a user that I added myself, that’s consistent across all of my machines.

If anyone has any ideas about what I can try, that would be great because I’m at my wits end here… Thanks!

[klaus]

just a me too. – I am experiencing the same problems. From readin the log of retroarch this is not surprising.

/opt/retropie/emulators/retroarch/bin/retroarch -L /opt/retropie/libretrocores/lr-gambatte/gambatte_libretro.so /media/evanas-snes/Super_Mario_Land.zip
RetroArch [WARN] :: patch_content :: Did not find a valid content patch.
MBC1 ROM loaded.
cgb: 0
rambanks: 0
rombanks: 4
RetroArch: rarch_log_libretro: [libretro INFO] :: [Gambatte]: Got internal game name: SUPER MARIOLAND.
RetroArch [WARN] :: gl_glsl_init :: [GL]: Stock GLSL shaders will be used.
RetroArch [WARN] :: udev_input_init :: [udev]: Couldn’t open any keyboard, mouse or touchpad. Are permissions set correctly for /dev/input/event*?

I do have a USB-keyboard attached and it is working fine – I can type in the console. So I checked the permissions as suggested in the error-message.

pi@raspberrypi /dev/input $ ls -ltrachrR /dev/input
/dev/input:
insgesamt 0
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 140 Mär 28 16:17 .
drwxr-xr-x 12 root root 3,2K Mär 28 16:31 ..
crw-rw-rwT 1 root input 13, 63 Mär 28 16:33 mice
crw-rw-rwT 1 root input 13, 65 Mär 28 16:33 event1
crw-rw-rwT 1 root input 13, 64 Mär 28 16:33 event0
drwxr-xrwx 2 root root 80 Mär 28 16:33 by-path
drwxr-xrwx 2 root root 80 Mär 28 16:33 by-id

/dev/input/by-path:
insgesamt 0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 Mär 28 16:17 platform-bcm2708_usb-usb-0:1.2:1.1-event -> ../event1
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 140 Mär 28 16:17 ..
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 Mär 28 16:17 platform-bcm2708_usb-usb-0:1.2:1.0-event-kbd -> ../event0
drwxr-xrwx 2 root root 80 Mär 28 16:33 .

/dev/input/by-id:
insgesamt 0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 Mär 28 16:17 usb-046a_0021-event-if01 -> ../event1
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 140 Mär 28 16:17 ..
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 9 Mär 28 16:17 usb-046a_0021-event-kbd -> ../event0
drwxr-xrwx 2 root root 80 Mär 28 16:33 .

originally the event-devices had 660 set, I tried setting o+rw as you can see but the error message did not change.

Where should I go from here?

[klaus]

so I ran strace on retroarch and it seems that some links of udev are wrong or missing. The strace can be founde here: http://dl.ffm.freifunk.net/pastebin/aikohdohjo

I am running retroarch as user pi (the user is in the input-group) like this:
/opt/retropie/emulators/retroarch/bin/retroarch -L /opt/retropie/libretrocores/lr-gambatte/gambatte_libretro.so game.smc

[klaus]

from IRC I got the hint that MAYBE this might have something to do with the installation method. So instead of installing the binary packages, I ran retropie-setup doing a source install yesterday. This did not change the behavior.

Also changing the input driver to sdl2 makes the error message about udev not finding an input device go away but keypresses are still not recognized.

[klaus]

I still did not get the keyboard to work but recently I purchased two gamepad and those work well.

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