Very cool!
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I have to try this. Looks awesome!
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Thanks @peli for adding McAirpos to the hardware section, and to others for testing!
I’m struggling a little with good gamepad detection and support, as I currently only have PS3 controllers at home. I am hoping at least to support gamepads with DPAD digital directional buttons and the ones normally used in cabinets. I’ll receive some more gamepads to test soon by mail, and since it probably will be difficult to support every possible controller option/setup/driver out there(fearing anolog axis direction will be harder), there might be some narrowing of support ambitions and leaving it more open to manual mappings by the community instead.
-Any thoughts/inputs in general?
-Any suggestions for the most commonly (digital)joysticks for arcade cabinets? ( USB and/or GPIO)
-Anyone who can confirm gamepads other than my own PS3 controllers that are working already? 
Any feedback is useful!
Br, Vegard
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My advice would be to crowdsource it 
Clearly specify which controller you’ve tested and which ones you haven’t. You’ll create an incentive for other enthusiasts to help you add more support over time. I don’t think you can win that fight alone; there’s too much stuff out there.
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Makes sense with such a delimitation and clarification of controller support, and to decouple/modularize it somehow, so it’s easier for others to make manual and custom modifications. -Unless there’s some other way to map whatever controller that already works inside EmulationStation(?). I guess also, that when and if you or someone in the community get the time to fix/pull request the pxt-arcade compilation of the game elf files to run well both inside the Zero uf2 images and natively on any RPi(which would be the best solution and should be possible) and maybe add support for two controllers, my launcher/wrapper and too much effort spent on it would be about as useful as an extra handful of sand in the desert, leaving of interest maybe just the tools for mapping controllers and a web page for downloading elf files(both of which you probably can do better in the long run, as well).
Have you though about supporting raspbian directly?
Sorry, @peli, I am not sure I understand your question. The McAirpos launcher and MakeCode’s elf game files already run in Raspberry Pi OS(aka Raspbian) and are only called from the shell in EmulationStation/RetroPie, if that is what you mean?
Oh great! My knowledge of RPI is very rusty. I guess my question is what do I do if i get an .elf file in RPI after following Welcome to McAirpos | McAirpos (vegz78.github.io) ?
Ok. With the elf game file downloaded from your provided link above, you can go to https://github.com/Vegz78/McAirpos#installation for installation and usage of McAirpos for installing McAirpos and launching the .elf game file from within RetroPie or from the Raspbian Linux console/CLI.
PS at the moment it only works with keyboard controls and up to two PS3 controllers, but I’m working on expanding controllers support/making controller support user configurable.
Expanded and tested support for more gamepads/controllers today, and added a “nomap” optional argument so that people can configure controllers manually if they want.
I would be very happy to hear about other controllers that work(or don’t work…), as well!
Br,
Vegard
Hi! This is so cool! Thanks for sharing. I have tried it with a couple of keyboards and a USB NES controller and they all work. I have been trying to make it work in a Picade, but I can’t figure out how to map the keys from the device to the makecode inputs. How do you use the nomap option? Thanks!
No map option:
launCharc nomap game_file.elf
It launches the game without uinput-mapper and direct mapping of buttons from the file /sd/arcade.cfg, which MS explains and has examples for here:
I would love to have support for Picade out of the box, but I have no access to one and am not familiar with its controllers. If you open an issue at the repo page on GitHub, maybe we can help each other figure it out and I can fix support in the code or in a Picade uinput-mapper profile?
Thanks! I will try the no map option and see if I can figure something out. If I can find more info I will open the issue on github. Thanks again for your help and for this awesome tool!
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Hi @Adri314,
I was just curious whether you got McAirpos to work with Picade and if you would like to share the process/configs on GitHub?
Br, Vegard
Hi, @Vegz78!
I haven’t had a chance yet, but thanks for reminding me. I’ll try again when I have a moment.
Cheers!
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Hi again @Adri314,
Just wanted to tip you that @rdmueller got McAirpos to work with the Picade and was kind enough to share with us how to do it!:
That is so awesome! I’ve kind of swamped with work, but I will try that as soon as I can. Thanks so much for letting me know!
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