How do BlueMSX Colecovision controls map to RetroPad?

Libretro Cores
#1

I’ve gotten Colecovision games working in BlueMSX core but I’m confused about controls. I loaded up Donkey Kong as a test and it prompts you to select a difficulty by pressing a number from 1 to 8. I want to press “1”, and I see in the controls menu that “button 1” is mapped to “A” on the RetroPad. But pressing A does nothing. I can only continue by pressing X or Y.

I suspect that the button names in the controls menu don’t correspond directly to button numbers on the Colecovision controller. Can someone please explain how the controls work?

I’ve done my best to search around for some documentation on this but no luck.

#2

Don’t you hate it when you find the answer immediately after asking?

In case anybody else needs to know this in the future, I found the “Final Test Cartridge” ROM, which tells you what buttons you’re pressing on the Colecovision controller. You can use that to test and map controls as you desire.

#3

I’ve sorted this out on my own using the test ROM. Someone should add this to official RetroArch documentation/wiki. (I’ve been informed that the core info screen apparently mentions this but it seriously wouldn’t hurt to have this information where people can actually find it with Google)

Blue MSX - ColecoVision

1 - Fire Left

2 - Fire Right

3 - 2

4 - 1

5 - 4

6 - 3

7 - 6

8 - 5

9 - 8

10 - 7

Select - *

Start - #/RS

By the way it’s impossible to press 0 or 9 on the ColecoVision controller because BlueMSX doesn’t have any controls in its menu that correspond to those buttons. I’ve reported the issue:

Any cores for Colecovision and Intellivision consoles?
#4

It’s documented since the beginning when you load the core and go into informations->core informations.
It could get improved but there’s no easy solution to have 14 buttons easily mapped on most controllers.
I’ll ignore the little ironic disrespectful comments, send PR to github if you want to work on improving that.

#5

core info

Fuck, why do I always forget about that. I feel really stupid now. And I’ll admit I posted here in a rush while I was still frustrated. I appreciate you taking the time to respond. Sorry I got a bit worked up.

#6

@Thatman84 I thought I you might be interested in this write-up three posts up with the control mapping. Maybe this fits with your work on documenting the cores?

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#7

I was looking for something to do last night…and this would have been good.

Now at top of my list. I have no experience with this core so will see if I can get content to load for testing

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#8

Added a PR for this core document

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