About retropad.cfg and core modules on Android

RetroArch Android devices
#1

Hi all and thank you for your great work!

I’m pretty new to the RA scene, so apologies if these questions have already been answered elsewhere.

I’m using RA on a unrooted Nexus 6P and it works great but I was just wondering if it is at all possible to remove installed core modules that are no longer needed? As an example, I installed 3 PSX modules and found that PCSXRearmed is the one I will use in the future but I could not find a way to remove the other 2? Not a massive problem, but I kinda like it to be neat :slight_smile: The only way I found so far is a bit drastic (uninstall and reinstall RA) :sweat_smile:

Also, I very much like the retropad overlay but I’m not sure I understand what the button between “Start” and “Select” do? (the one that looks like a keyboard). If I press it accidentally, it goes into a fullscreen/immersive mode that I can’t get out of! Is it supposed to bring up a keyboard or maybe is a quick “toggle overlay” button for when RA is used on an android stick connected to a TV or something? So my question is: is it possible to make the overlay come back after pressing that button without having to restart the app? Alternatively I was looking into modifying retropad.cfg and remove that specific button, but I can see the file is stored in an inaccesible part of the system unless you are rooted. Is it possible to modify it within the app itself?

Thank you very, very much!

Regards, -R

#2

Welcome!

On a non-rooted Android device you can clear cores/history/etc. by just deleting the app data (this doesn’t affect your save files) instead of uninstalling the whole app. Therefore it makes sense to always keep a backup of your RetroArch config. It is stored under /sdcard/Android/data/com.retroarch. Your save files are stored in /sdcard/RetroArch.

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#3

There’s no way to remove unneeded cores without root, unfortunately, but you can clear the app’s data and just download the handful that you want to use (make sure you backup your cfgs just in case they get wiped out at the same time; I can’t recall whether that happens or not and I would hate to put you in a bad spot with my advice)

If you go to settings > directory, you can change your overlay directory to somewhere user-writeable on your internal storage (presumably, the retroarch directory in your internal storage is where you’ll want to do it) and then re-fetch the overlays from the online updater. Once you do that, open the retropad.cfg file in a text editor and you’ll see the “osk toggle” is the last button descriptor on most of the layouts, which makes it easy to remove by just reducing the number of descs on the affected layouts by 1 (for example, overlay0 has 29 descs as per the line 56 (overlay0_descs = 29). Just change that to 28 and RetroArch will stop looking for new buttons before it gets to that one. :slight_smile:

Does that make sense?

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#4

Thank you very much! Very good advice, in fact I think I have used this “trick” on other apps before… :slight_smile: Will try it out!

#5

Thank you very much hunterk!

It makes perfect sense :slight_smile: I was having a look here -> https://github.com/libretro/common-overlays/blob/master/gamepads/retropad/retropad.cfg while I was waiting for your reply and that “osk-toggle” did get my attention. I was actually thinking of removing it from the code but your solution is way more elegant :grinning:

Thanks a lot and will let you know how I got on!

Cheers!

#6

Hi guys :slight_smile: Just wanted to let you know that all worked perfectly! Thank you very much again! -R