Is it possible to move gamepad buttons a little closer?

RetroArch Android devices
#1

I have some MAME arcade games which uses 2 or 3 button pressed at the same time to perform some moves. To do this using the default gamepads available is very hard because I want to use my right thumb only to press 2 or 3 button combinations during gameplay. The default button layout places the X,Y,A,B buttons way too far from each other, making it almost impossible to me to press 2 of them together with my right thumb. Pressing 3 buttons is even more difficult, almost impossible.

So I woulf like to know if there’s a way of getting these buttons a little closer to each other, so I would be able to press 2 or 3 of them together using my right thumb only.

#2

You can use the overlay scaling options to make it smaller, but that will also move it closer to the center of the screen. The only other way is to modify an overlay using either the Windows-based editor (available from the online updater’s content downloader in ‘utilities’) or via text editor.

#3

Which file / parameters I should edit in order to make buttons and its detection boxes closer? If you could tell me the path to these files it would help too. I’m using Retroarch Plus for Android in my mobile phone.

#4

By default, overlays are in a root-owned directory so people can’t mess them up accidentally, so you’ll need to change that:

Make a new directory in your user-owned RetroArch directory named ‘overlays’, then go to settings > directory and change your overlays path to that new folder. Then, go to the online updater and ‘update overlays’. That will populate the new location with all of the overlays and you’ll have proper permissions to edit them.

Next, find the overlay you want to edit. Open its cfg file with a text editor. You’ll see a bunch of lines labeled “overlayX_descY = blahblahblah”. They describe the function, location and size of the buttons. See here for more details: https://docs.libretro.com/development/retroarch/input/overlay/#coordinate-descriptors

You’ll need to find the ones for a, b, x and y, and move the first set of coordinates (the x and y location of the centerpoint of the button) closer together. The second set of coordinates controls the size of the button.

#5

Thank you very much Hunterk, I will give it a shot!! :smiley: