Multiple inputs-mapping profiles swappables on the fly

General Development
#1

Hi everyone, I’m new to the forum and I don’t know if this topic has already been discussed before, in which case I apologize.

As far as I understand, RetroArch does not allow to assign more than one inputs mapping profile to each player: I believe that adding the option to assign more than one inputs profile and then be able to swap them by a button/key press (or at least via hotkey combo) while playing and without messing with pause/menu/submenu would be incredibly useful.

In fact, it would be essential for the arcade/cabinet project that I am designing, since it sports some very peculiar and cool features :grin:

In my opinion, 3 profiles for each player should be plenty enough. In addition, I suggest to save the extra profiles in a separate config file, for ex. something like “P1InputsProfiles.cfg”, because I think the RetroArch.cfg is too long and already not so user-friendly if one must “navigate” deep into it just to make few hard-coded mods.

I think that this feature shouldn’t require a lot of programming effort: I don’t know if this is the right section for ask but I hope the Libretro/RetroArch team will read my request and give it a serious thought!

P.S.: while we are on the subject I would like to ask if RetroArch allows to change the orientation of the screen (rotate it) on the fly, i.e. without pausing the game and using the menus but just with a button/key press or a hotkey combo. If the option is not there, it should be added too!

Thank you in advance for your attention

NSW Button Mapping for RetroArch
#2

We don’t have any mechanism for that, no. The closest thing would be to switch among config fragments using --appendconfig but there’s no way to switch among them from the menus.

There’s no menu-less rotation, either, unfortunately.

#3

Hello! Thanks for the reply. So you confirm that both features aren’t actually available in the current version of RetroArch and you agree that it might be useful to implement them, right?

#4

Useful for someone, clearly :slight_smile:

But I think they’re probably a bit niche, even for us. We support autoconfig profiles that allow you to change inputs with different devices and we support switching to different configs

#5

Well, I can think of some scenarios where these features could be extremely useful: for ex. if I want to rotate the screen and play the game from a different visual (now it’s not important why) I also need to switch the inputs.

For ex. if I rotate the screen 90 degree clockwise, the “up” key bind should become “right” and so on, in order to keep all the inputs congruent with the rotated view. And it is clear that this must take place on the fly, because accessing various menus and submenus to manually modify the inputs bind would be a total nonsense.

Even if these features would be appealing (maybe) for a niche of users, I still think that adding them could be done without much effort (probably very few lines of code) therefore It may be worth doing.

Please let the RetroArch dev team think about it!

Many thanks