Suggestion: Default button mapping for 6-button controllers

General Development
#1

I’ve bough myself a couple of those nice Sega-style 6-button controllers from 8bitdo and Retro-Bit. For obvious reasons, I’m primarily looking to use those controllers with the Sega Saturn and Genesis/Mega Drive cores:

8bitdo 6 button controller1492×945

Retrobit 6 button controller1500×1005

Unfortunately, the individual cores come with different default button mappings and you have to manually remap them. A mapping that, for example, works with Beetle won’t work in GenesisPlusGX or Picodrive.

I’d like to make a suggestion, that all Sega cores should be configured to use one and the same button mapping under the hood. The best layout might look like this:

mapping suggestion647×606

This layout would work best with the default “diamond-shaped” layout (north, south, west, east) used by most other emulators and the Retroarch interface:

diamond layout647×606

As a nice side-effect, this layout would also work fine when playing Street Fighter 2 on a SNES emulator. The bottom row of the 6 face buttons would belong to the the 3 different kicks (weak, medium, strong). While the top row matches perfectly to the 3 punches.

#2

The button layouts are set by the individual core authors, who are not always us. That is, Blastem, for example, uses a different layout than GPGX because those core authors have different ideas as to the best experience for users.

Luckily, as a user, you can always change the core mapping to suit your preferences.

2 Likes
#3

@hunterk Manually remapping the buttons for all the different Sega cores is a real hassle for most users.

How about an additional option for the Sega cores that let’s users toggle between a diamond-shaped and 6-button controller?

The default would be as is. But when a user has a dedicated 6-button-controller, you could change this new setting and Retroarch automatically copies a remap-file for the Sega cores that uses the layout proposed above?