Just when I think I have everything setup right! I cannot get controller configs to stick. Once I get one thing to work, another stops. If I delete all the cfg’s, including the default, retroarch goes back to rgui and when resetting to xmb, there’s no background, icons, or anything else, etc. All I want is to be able to close retroarch via a hotkey, in this case “start”, using the hotkey button, “select”, while maintaining controller profiles for 4 controllers, for each system. I would also like to keep r3+l3 to get into my RA menu. I have tried several ways of doing this, but it seems RA pulls whatever config it wants seemingly at random. I’ve tried per core on and off, per game on and off, saving remaps, not saving remaps, etc, etc, etc. I’ve even manually created configs. Nothing seems to stick. I would greatly appreciate any advice, order of operations, etc.
I came here to basically ask the same thing; I have USB NES/SNES/Genesis controllers and while I would love to use Retroarch as an “all in one” emulator for the different systems, I will need to figure out how to save multiple different controllers/configurations for each of the different systems before I do.
Have you tried turning off autoconfiguration in the input settings? That should put it back to the old setup, where you have to go in and bind your inputs, which should then be saved in the config, IIRC.
I turned off autoconfig, didn’t make any difference for me.
It’s a nice program and all, but if I can’t use multiple controllers easily with it then I guess it’s just not for me. I’ll probably just use some other front end.
RetroArch is not a frontend like other frontends 
It does a lot more, the others… well just launch.
Anyway, there is one problem with such adapters and that is that no matter what we do, we can’t differentiate one from another because they all have the same device name, VID and PID. So you have two alternatives, per-core configs, or overrides.
Before going in depth on those options try this:
- Disable core specific configurations
- Exit Retroarch
Then do something like this
- Connect SNES gamepad
- Start RetroArch
- Go to input settings / input user 1 binds
- Select user 1 default all
- Select user 1 bind all, let the timer run out for the buttons not present
- Go to the main menu and select save new config, then you can rename it to snes.cfg or whatever
Repeat for your other pads Then create a shortcut to retroarch or start it from the commandline like this: retroarch.exe --verbose --menu -c path/to/my/configs/snes.cfg
If it doesn’t work like this then going further is futile (but it should)