Constant Left/Right Bias on 2 Player?

RetroArch General
#1

Hi all,

Fairly new to the whole retro gaming experience… I am running a RaspberryPi 3, RetroPie 4 install.

I have a peculiar behavior that I’m trying to fix during 2 Player gaming. The player two controller seems to have some kind of constant bias towards a direction (in bubblebobble, it’s right – in mario bros., it’s left). Essentially, if you jump, your character will move to a certain side at all times, making the game unplayable.

Things I’ve checked:

-Using two identical NES controllers and two identical PS3 controllers. Seems to happen regardless – not a controller issue and not an issue of mixing dissimilar controller types. -Using two different emulators, NES and SNES. The behavior occurs.
-Have not tried different USB ports on the Raspberry Pi. Will do that shortly. -I have manually configured the retroarch.cfg’s for both NES and SNES emulators to be identical.

I’m really at a loss for what might be causing this and I’m trying to configure this as a christmas gift! Any help is appreciated!

#2

quick update:

-(as expected) it doesn’t matter if i physically change USB ports for the controllers. whatever player/controller is Player 2, has this issue.
-Other games seem to function just fine (Burgertime, super bomberman, etc.) where the player is never ‘free floating’ in air. The two games that malfunction share that trait… mario and bubblebobble. -I don’t seem to have the ‘menu scrolling’ issue I’ve read about here. I’ve only seen left/right issues in the two player play.

So at the very least, many games function just fine, but I have a feeling that the error is still underlying and the games are just resilient to it. Maybe I’m being spoiled, but those two games are my favorites! I hope I can get this fixed.

#3

another update: -found a jumping game for SNES, as currently I had only tried jumping NES games. Mortal Kombat for SNES seems to work without the issue (although its jumping mechanics are kind of hokey so I’m wondering whether it’s a valid comparison. seems to be ‘all or nothing’ compared to mario’s more fluid jumping mechanics)

so it seems like the only problem is currently with NES jumping games. I am going to set up a temporary retroarch.cfg for NES using the PS3 controller and see if the issue goes away. If it does, it seems to isolate the issue to the NES controller.

#4

Problem solved.

Not exactly sure why this was a problem, but I noticed that inside of the retroarch/all/retroarch.cfg that the sections for player1_, player3_, player4_, etc. button mappings were all set to “nul”… the player2_ settings were NOT all set to “nul”, some were set to numbers and some to keyboard letters. Not sure why that was, but I set them all back to “nul” to match, and this eliminated the issues.

No idea why this would’ve solely affected the NES roms while using only NES controller, but it seems to be fixed now.

So, uh, yeh.