In older versions I could turn my gamepad on after retroarch has been started and it would work. Now in the newer versions if I turn the controller on after retroarch has started, it doesn’t read the gamepads to be able to work.
Using raw input driver by any chance? Here xinput controller driver will not reconnect with raw input driver, but will with dinput, which does not really make much sense…
sdl2 was selected for the input driver while using xinput. so i changed it to dinput instead like you said and afterplugging now works. Problem with this is, both dinput and xinput are shown in the windows joy.cpl regardless of not having dinput seen in ds4windows - ryochan. Hope this doesn’t cause any problems. Havent tried anything multiplayer yet to see.