Its in keyboard mode, ultimarcs site has firmware to where i could flash it and have controller/keyboard switching ability but he says if its flashed on boards built before 2015 that it will brick them and I bought it in 2015 so not sure how to tell.
Anyway… Is this the issue? Im pretty possitive on my old setup that I ran the ipac and controllers both at the same time.
keyboard is what you want, yeah. You can have keyboard assignments and gamepad assignments that coexist. if you look in your retroarch.cfg, you should see stuff like input_player1_b_key = “z” and input_player1_btn = “4”
If those are the only input devices you’re going to be using, I would probably try disabling autoconfiguration and just hard-map them.
So input bindings are right in the main cfg file? Is auto configure in the main cfg file too and just switch it to 0?
Sadly I think when I first configured this drive I set core over-rides for every core and will probably have to go into each core and map input. I guess its a one time thing so not the end of the world.
I think when testing I loaded turbo grafx core and set inputs for ipac and my controller and saved the profiles and when loading the game again the controller still didnt work but i have no issues at all if i unplug the ipac.
I just dont understand whats causing the conflict when the ipac is plugged in 
Inputs are indeed right in the main config, but don’t worry: input stuff is (for the most part) invisible to the override system. It can’t see them, so overrides won’t include them, whether they’re retropad mappings, hotkeys, whatever.
I don’t know what it’s called in the config file, but if you go to settings > input, it’s “autoconfig ON/OFF”. IIRC, it’s an advanced setting, so you’ll need to stop by settings > user interface > show advanced settings ON first before it’ll be visible.
You sure about inputs not being core specific? I tried mapping my controller and saving profile with just retroarch open , then opened a core/game and the inputs were empty.
I also had a hell of a time on another crt setup using this drive and for weeks couldnt figure out why crt switchres wasnt working. I edited and messed with the main cfg file for hours and hours untill I found the core specific cfg files and after setting crt switchres in each cores cfg… It worked perfect.
Im starting to wonder if i screwed up the global settings or something in retroarch when I originally configured it years ago. Its been solong I dont know what guide i followed or if it had me set some setting that messed up global settings or something.
I spent 3 weeks overhauling my cab with new pc and rewiring, and adding rgb buttons and finally get it done and been stuck just trying to get retroarchs inputs to work for a week or more now. Im making no progress at all. I feel like just starting over but have 6tb of games so that would be a nightmare too.
You could indeed have something screwy somewhere. I would suggest not wiping out your existing installation but starting a new, separate installation and just go straight to the input stuff and see if it comes together at all. If so, you can try to salvage some of your old config stuff (e.g., maybe just replacing the retroarch.cfg will do it) instead of re-doing everything
Ive made clean retroarch installation on a seperate drive , installed a single core, same exact issue. Solong as the ipac is plugged in the controllers are rendered useless even though they are configured and work fine if the ipac is unplugged. Ive used this same ipac4 in this same cab with these same controllers but just using an older retroarch and win7 instead of win10 and never had this issue. I even uninstalled the winipac utility and reinstalled, its definatelly in keyboard only mode as thats the only mode this ipac4 will do unless i flash firmware. Im loosing my mind trying to figure this out.
At this point I would be happy if retroarch would not even see my ipac and I would just use controllers for everything retroarch runs but not sure if thats even possible or an option?
I don’t actually know of anything that would prevent the controllers from working entirely. I guess maybe they’re getting pushed over to another port or something? If you go to settings > input > port 1 controls, what is shown in the device index? can you select the 360 pads there?
ports 1 and 2 are always set to the ipac and cant be changed if its plugged in. I tried to trick it by unplugging the ipac and turning controllers on, controllers went to inputs 1 and 2 and worked fine untill i plugged in the ipac then the ipac takes over for ports 1 and 2 again
Hmm, the keyboard shouldn’t be taking primacy over gamepads… Can you try going to settings > driver and try using a different gamepad and/or input driver? (make sure you close RetroArch and reopen it after each change, don’t choose “null” drivers and make a backup of your config before you get started, in case you get locked out somehow)
currently input driver is dinput and gamepad driver is set to xinput
I assume input driver is for keyboards etc so should I try changing it to maybe lower its priority over the controllers?
edit… so changing input drivers alone didnt have any effect except loosing my mouse when selecting raw driver.
Changing gamepad driver from xinput to dinput had no effect but selecting sdl2 made the ipac4 switch to unconfigured “loading fallback” and then the controller worked… still have to test if ipac4 works or not. Do you think I need to just find the right combination of drivers?
Also wanted to mention that my wireless dongle for the controllers are on a powered usb hub with my mouse and keyboard, didnt know if i should try plugging it directly in the motherboard?
awesome… so setting controllers to sdl2 makes both controller and ipac4 work but only after about 6 autoconfig ipac4 error messages scroll from the bottom of the screen. This is a step in the right direction though! thanks so much!
Now if i can just get those messages to go away, I may keep trying different driver combos as well. Do you think controllers wireless dongle being on a hub has anything to do with it?
So ive plugged wireless dongle into motherboard…no difference. I think your correct that If I could somehow manually set the IPAC4 to populate input ports 3 and 4 then everything would work fine since changing controller driver to sdl2 makes the IPAC give an error which allows the controllers to populate input ports 1 and 2 before the IPAC “loads fallback” and takes ports 3 and 4
Well…besides all the other stuff I posted I tried plugging the controllers wireless dongle into the motherboard and unplugging the ipac4 and rebooting computer hoping it would give some kind of priority to the controllers, then started retroarch and configured ports 1 and 2 with the controllers. turned of auto config inputs and then plugged in the ipac4 and the ipac still took priority.
Keeping the input driver on dinput and setting the controllers input driver to sdl2 ended up giving priority to the controllers finally and sofar they been staying that way.
I do get these weird input notifications when loading each game… Device disconnected from port1 sdl2 Device disconnected from port2 sdl2 Device disconnected from port3 sdl2 Device disconnected from port4 sdl2
but… my controllers and arcade controls are finally both working in retroarch.
If anyone knows another way to force controllers to take priority without changing driver or how to disable the input notifications on every game start with the sdl2 driver please let me know… Hunter…you pushed me in the right direction man…lifesaver! thank you!
Input notifications I can definitely help with 
Look in settings > onscreen display > onscreen notifications > visibility. If you don’t see one for the controllers, it may only be in the nightly builds, in which case you can either update to that or wait for a stable, which should be coming along… soon-ish.
Ok ill check it out. Thanks for the help, I appreciate it!!!
Np, I’m glad you got it going.
Guess I should of known better 
… It all works fine launching retroarch on its own but once in launchbox or bigbox the damn ipac4 is taking priority again wtf 
Make sure they’re not pointing to some other config somewhere that doesn’t have the driver change(s).
If there was core overrides for controls is there a way to globally save my working control setup?
Im also reading about this little app and wondering if I could use it to order the controllers and ipac…
Yep, I went into manage emulators and every retroarch core has a startup command line entered pointing to a cores cfg file. I been testing the turbografx16 so this cores launch command was
" -c “config\mednafen_pce_fast_libretro.cfg”
I dont remember why I did that for each core. I dont know what core specific settings I would of needed. I remember following a guide on youtube when I did it. I deleted the launch command and now controller and control panel both work. So I guess I will just delete all the cores startup commands then and hope it doesnt break something.
Before doing this I tried that devreorder utility for re-ordering dinput8 controllers. It didnt work