Help: How to use Hotkeys / Retroarch Menu with all controllers?

Hi everyone. First up, I love Retrobat. After working my way through some issues that were due to my specific hardware, I'm now almost where I want to be, except for the controller issue.

I do have an XBox controller as well as a generic controller with analog sticks which I want to use for platforms that benefit from analog input (i.e. Playstation and N64, possibly the odd Saturn game). Then I have a pair of SNES-like gamepads which I want to use for a few Systems (SNES of course, but also NES and PC Engine) and I have a pair of SEGA Megadrive controllers which I want to use for others (all the Sega consoles as well as Arcade / NEO GEO).

Reshuffling the order of controllers within the Retroarch menu does work fine. I could set it up in the way that I wanted. Now my problem is that I can only use the Hotkeys or access the Retroarch Menu with my XBox controller, which is not particularly handy when playing an SNES title with my SNES pads for example. I found out that Retroarch removed the feature to navigate the menu with any controller for a while. The Retroarch version included in Retrobat also doesn't have that feature. So I installed the latest Retroarch version which has brought back the feature and I turned on the option to use the menu with all controllers.

Unfortunately, while that allows me to navigate the menu with all controllers, I still can only access it via my XBox controller. Hotkeys also don't work on any controller other than the XBox one.

So I turned off the option in the developer menu of EmulationStation to manage my controllers. That however wasn't an ideal solution either. For one, Retroarch natively doesn't give me the option to configure many hotkeys, but even the fundamental stuff didn't work well. Sometimes I can call up the Retroarch menu, sometimes I can't, without me being able to find any pattern so far. Also, the controller configuration within Retroarch doesn't work well. The buttonlayout doesn't seem to work and it doesn't recognise all buttons on my Sega controllers.

So my question would be: Is there a way to enable the Retrobat Hotkeys for all controllers so that I can continue to have Retrobat manage my controllers within Retroarch? Otherwise I guess I will have to continue my struggle with the Retroarch configuration which doesn't seem to do what I want it to do.
One option would be to change the order of controllers on a core by core basis within EmulationStation, but I haven't fund a feature like that. Did I miss it somehow? Is there another way?

As always, despite me searching the forum for a solution for an hour yesterday, one always only finds a potentially helpful post right after posting the question. Just now I saw an FAQ entry which might help. Turns out that I have hidden the RetroBat menu because I didn't understand the point of it, which is why it didn't occur to me to look there in order to configure my controllers. I'll un-hide it and I will try my luck. If it works, I'll share my solution so that hopefully others can benefit from it as well.

All right, going into the Retrobat menu didn't do anything I couldn't have done from within the emulator. But, for some reason, the gamepad configuration did work this time around. Don't know why, but I'm happy either way. I still can't configure generic hotkeys to be used by all controllers and Retroarch still doesn't recognise the shoulder-buttons on my Sega controllers, but at least I can enter the Retroarch menu with all controllers now and the shoulder buttons on the Sega controllers aren't really needed anyway, given that the original controller didn't have them at all.

So yeah, while not being an optimal solution, it is workable now.

Basically, for anyone with a similar problem, who wants to be able to use the Retroarch menu with multiple controllers, here's a quick summary of what I did:

1. Download the latest Nightly release of RetroArch from the official website.
   
2. Install the new Retroarch version into the retrobat/emulators/retroarch folder
   
3. Run Retrobat, open the menu, go into the "developer" menu and deactivate the option which configures your controllers automatically.
   
4. Start a game for a core of your choice and enter the Retroarch menu with your main controller.
   
5. Go to Settings>Input>Menu control and activate the option to use the Retroarch menu with all controllers
   
6. Go to Settings>Input>Hotkeys and add a command to open the Retroarch menu. Only the commands for closing the game and for opening the menu can be generically configured. All other hotkeys can only be configured for a specific controller.
   
7. In Settings>Input, configure all of your gamepads, remember the numbers for all gamepads
   
8. Go to Quickmenu>Controls and reassign your controllers for this specific core. In my case, I assigned gamepads 2 & 3 to ports 1 & 2 for Snes9x, but gamepads 4 & 5 to ports 1 & 2 for the Megadrive emulator.
   
9. Save core settings
   
10. Repeat steps 7 & 8 for all emulator cores you plan on using.
    

That's a workable solution. But of course it would be better if I could change the gamepad order on a core by core basis from within EmulationStation, so that I could always use all hotkeys. Alas, I'm sure the developers have enough on their plate as it is. Overall, they're doing an awesome job anyway.

Hello
Desactivate controllers autoconfiguration is enough to create your pad configuration directly in Retroarch. But i don't know about hotkeys if what you get is a normal behaviour or not.
By updating Retroarch, you may have broke some integrated features. Maybe it's better for you to wait to the V5 (btw you can already test it by compiling the build on the github)

Maybe I missed something, but I apparently wasn't able to make it work with the version of Retroarch that came with Retrobat.

Either way, I got it working now for the most part. I think I also found the pattern I didn't see before: while my core settings seem to work consistently, the global RetroArch settings do cause issues. In my case, the global order of controllers does change every now and then without me doing anything. So while on a core level, controller 2 was still correctly mapped to port 1, globally controller 2 was all of a sudden a different gamepad.

I'll keep an eye on it though. If it always changes into the exact same order, I might just have to rework the core mappings.