Poor DPad Performance on the ouya - Possible solution

General Development
#1

Hi there,

so I have as many others problems with the dpad performance on my ouya when using the ouya controller. I have fidelled around quite a bit now and I think I might be on to something now.

I first tried the latest testing build to see if that would solve the problem. It did sadly that was only temporary. I then reinstalled retroarch, turned wifi off, fiddled with the bluetooth settings. That didn’t do much either. And then I enabled the IME Debugging that shows inputs on screen.

What happened now is the following. When the Analog sticks on the Ouya controller are not in a completely neutral position they tend to send input every once in a while. Disrupting the input of the DPad as it is a continuous input for a split second.

You can also see this pretty easy when the dpad is working and you are running around and suddenly you move either analog stick. Suddenly the Dpad does nothing your character stutters around etc.

So basically input from the analog sticks overwrites the dpad input. I don’t know if this is actually solvable within retroarch, as I don’t know if the input reported by the ouya is actually just the analog sticks then or if the dpad is still in there somewhere. If it is I think it would suffice to add a setting to completely ignore the analog stick inputs if that is possible.

#2

I believe you can already either disable autoconfiguration and use manual binds to simply not map any analogs, or specify via RGUI that it’s a gamepad without analogs via the settings > input settings menu (not sure how well that works on Android, though).

#3

@ Blackclaws: I noticed that your suggestion to “flick” the analog sticks helps, as this generally clears the d-pad of stutter for a bit, but in my testing it would come back within a few minutes.

@hunterk: If I disable the autoconfig, I can get pretty flawless d-pad performance. The problem is that this comes at the cost of the “U” button on the Ouya controller no longer bringing up the menu overlay, which means that I can’t config my buttons, save state, etc.

What I ended up settling for was to leave the autoconfig on, but then inside the SNES 9x NEXT core, I set the gamepad to be “generic keyboard” instead of “Ouya”. After I did this, the analog sticks started working (they don’t under the “Ouya” setting), and I was able to use the left stick in place of the d-pad. Didn’t fix the d-pad issue, but at least made Zelda and Super Metroid playable! Small victories… You guys have any other suggestions to try? I love this Ouya so far, it’s a great all-in-one entertainment option with XBMC and Retroarch.

#4

@stabu In the next release, you should be able to map non-retropad functions (fast-forward, rewind, menu, etc.) to gamepad buttons via RGUI, so that should allow you to completely dump autoconfiguration.

#5

That’s awesome, thanks for the info.