XBox 360 Controller not recognised on Shield TV or Portable

RetroArch Android devices
#1

Hi,

I am having problems getting any of my 360 controllers (official MS ones) recognised by Retroarch both on my Shield Portable or Shield TV I am running the latest version from the playstore (1.3.4) on both devices. Portable is on Kitkat 4.4.2 (and rooted), and the Shield TV is on the latest Marshmallow (3.1)

I can manage to configure the keys and save them to a file using the autoconfig guide. The problem is that the device name in the config always comes blank, and the filename itself is just “.cfg”. Also, I never get the yellow display text when I plug the controller and press a button (either before or after generating an autoconfig file)

The controller works fine on other emulators on my shield devices, and it used to work in a very old version of retroarch (I think before the xmb menu got first introduced).

I am lost for what else to try… I love this emulator and really want to be able to do some multiplayer gaming with my xbox pads :slight_smile:

#2

Make sure you have input autoconfiguration enabled and make sure your autoconfig profiles are up-to-date via the online updater.

#3

Thanks for the response. I did use the online updater and have the autoconfiguration enabled. I don’t have issues with other controllers I tried.

Even when I had a controller that was not supported in the auto configs, it still came up with the yellow message when I pressed a button, saying that the controller was not configured.

But the with xbox controller I get nothing at all :frowning: Like I said, when generating a config file, the device name is empty. This is what I get:

input_device = “” input_vendor_id = 1118 input_product_id = 654 input_driver = “android”

I wonder if its an issue related to newer xbox 360 gamepads ( I need to find an old one at work and see if that has the same issues)

#4

Hi,

Just wondering if anyone else has the same issues or if anyone is looking into this? I have also tried a friend’s xbox 360 pad and I have the same issues.

I have already uninstalled and re-installed the app through the play store. Do other shield portable and shield tv owners have no issues with these pads? Any advice on what I could try?

#5

Have you tried using the retroarch latest nightlies?

#6

Hi, I just tried the latest nightly and I still can’t get any response from retroarch when using the xbox 360 controller :frowning:

I did uninstall the previous version and delete any folder that was left over. Not sure what else to try, or if there could be another app that could somehow interfere?

#7

Have you tried disabling the autoconfig and map the controller manually using user 1 bind all? Also if you are root you can try the app tincore keymapper, retroarch recognizes all its controller profiles.

#8

Yes, I have tried using the autoconfig, and I can map all the keys without any issues (they work). The problem is that once I save the config, the config file has no name, and the property input_device in the config is blank, and the config is not picked up once I use the controller, which makes me thing that the software is not getting the device name at all, therefore it can’t associate the controller to the config. Maybe the root of the problem is the fact that it can’t get the device name?

Like I said, when I connect the controller and hit ANY button there is no OSD message at all. I have managed to configure the most obscure gamepads and usb adapters and they all triggered the OSD message, I could configure them, an they would recognise my custom config.

I will try tincore, I don’t know about that app, but I will see what it can do - I am rooted on the shield portable. The problem is that even if that worked, it won’t fix the same issue I have with my shield TV, which is the main place where I want to use multiple controllers

#9

Just try to Disable autoconfig and map the controller keys in bind all, do not press save autoconfig just exit retroarch using the quit retroarch option.

#10

That worked, but will that store these settings permanently, or will it delete them if I configure another pad? Can I have these settings work for multiple gamepads, and will that work once I plug other types of pads?

Also, I could set this up on the shield portable because I could control the UI using the touch screen, but what about the shield TV?

#11

Yeah it will store the settings, if you want to use more gamepads just map them the same way to different user input bind.

For the shield tv you could use a bluetooth mouse and navigate retroarch using a gamepad overlay.

#12

Unfortunately that did not work on the shield tv.

First of all I could not get the mouse to work at all. I tried a wired and bluetooth mouse. All I get is a white pointer (which I guess is the one that retroarch uses) and a black one with a white border (which is the shield’s one). I can move the black one, but it doesn’t do anything to the interface. I changed the interface to the glui one (that was the one that worked with touch so I assumed it would wok with mouse too) I did turn mouse support on (although I am not sure what it means to use a ‘gamepad overlay’?)

On top of that, once I turned the setting to use the autoconfig off, after restarting the app it would not recognise my shield controller anymore. So I had to go in the cfg file and turn the detect autoconfig back on.

Feels like whatever I try doesn’t work. :frowning:

Can anybody confirm that they can use xbox controllers with autoconfig on the shield? Like I said, it used to work with much older versions of retroarch. Am I the only one that has these problems on shield consoles?

Is the only way to get retroarch use the xbox controller to manually map the controls and not use autoconfigs? (which is just a workaround then, surely not the way it is meant to work)

#13

Go to onscreen overlay and turn off hide overlay in menu and in the option overlay preset select a gamepad overlay, see if you can navigate the menu using the overlay.

#14

Thanks talos91, I can ‘kind of’ navigate in that way, but because it reads it as a touch, as soon as I hover on a button it’s considered as a click, so I end up turning things on/off and navigating to the wrong submenus, it’s quite hard to use. I think what I’ll do is to try and configure it on the shield portable, save the retroarch config, and manually edit the one on the shield TV. If I understand correctly these mappings are saved in that file.

By the way, the fact that I cannot use autoconfigs with the xbox controller, is it a bug? Or does that work correctly for you or others ? (assuming you tried it on a shield device)

#19

awesome :slight_smile: Is that in the latest nightly so I can test it?

#21

Thanks radius, I side loaded the last nightly on the shield portable and it worked :slight_smile:

Any reason you can think it doesn’t want to install on the Shield TV? I have the ‘install from unknown sources’ turned on. (i did side load other things before) When I install the app it just says ‘App not installed’

#23

I was using the current one from the store. I think this may be a problem with my shield TV. I have tried installing other APKs and none worked :frowning: Sometimes It just says that the app could not be installed. Other times it also says that the apk may be corrupted

It definitely worked before the latest shield update, so it may be related to that. Need to figure out if I can solve that now. Worse case scenario, at least once you have a new stable version in the store I’ll be able to use it :slight_smile:

Thanks for fixing the problem with the pad!