Using Controlblock with arcade and SNES wired

[ptitneo]

Hello world, first post in here!

I’m working on my own little project of converting an iCade into a standalone RPi2 emulation machine, and I received my shiny new Controlblock yesterday.

LED, toggle switch and arcade controls all work great so far (thanks petrockblock :)) but I was thinking of adding a couple of SNES ports to the cabinet, to allow 2 player games and a more faithful experience for console games.

Looking at the wiring instructions on https://www.petrockblock.com/2014/12/29/controlblock-power-switch-and-io-for-the-raspberry-pi/#UsingArcadeControllers_with_the_ControlBlock, it looks like I should be able to wire both 1 player arcade and SNES ports easily.

So my question is: has anyone here tried that already?

I’m pretty much like Jon Snow as far as retropie is concerned; how could I switch the Controlblock driver from one mode to the other? I assume some command line would be required when launching the SNES emulator to stop the Controlblock service, switch the config file, and restart it. Would that be possible? Can I revert that back to arcade when exiting to ES? Can I do that on a per-game basis?

The best thing would be for the Controlblock driver to detect the SNES controller automatically, or if not possible, to read an extra GPIO pin to decide which mode to use so that I could use a physical switch to toggle between the two modes :)

Many thanks !

[petrockblog]

To switch the game pad type you would have to switch it in the ControlBlock config file at /etc/controlblockconfig.cfg and run “sudo service controlblockservice restart”.

[ptitneo]

Yep, but would not be possible to do this automatically when running, say, the SNES emulator from ES? And revert it when going back to ES. My iCade doesn’t have room for a full keyboard…

[petrockblog]

You would have to write a bash script and adapt the EmulationStation file ~/.emulationstation/es_systems.cfg accordingly.

[ptitneo]

Sounds good, I’ll try that. Thanks!

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