Pocket Snes How to use controller 2

I want to train in a fighting game, but I need the second player controller to select a character.
What do I do?
Thanks

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Are you using Retroarch or another emulator?

Hello there! Welcome to the community!
You can basically think of the gameshell as a miniature computer - and this comes down to the “keypad” as being a keyboard.


You can see from the diagram that each key is in fact a letter on a Keyboard.

There are a limited number of keys, so depending on the console you’re emulating, it could be difficult to map a second set of keys for a second player. You could probably get away with a single key such as “select” being mapped to P2’s start button. You wouldn’t be able to use a dpad unfortunately, unless you sacrificed a lot of keys, eg possibly using the light bar attachment. It’s all about allocating a role fo each key input.

As for binding new keys or even enabling multiplayer on PocketSNES, the version that comes with the gameshell is a precompiled binary with the defined keys already set. We can’t define new controls unless we recompile it. We will also need to enable multiplayer as this is also disabled by default.
See line 558 here:

This is a lot of work just to get a second player for the sake of training. I would strongly recommend using a Retroarch core, for the ease of simply re assigning keys and inputs without having to recompile from scratch. Ie, the other SNES emulator on the gameshell.

Start by using a Retroarch core to load a game, eg SFC9X. From here, push the hot key to enter the Retroarch menu. It would be either a) Menu, b) Shift + Menu or c) Select + Start.

You should be initially brought to the “quick” menu. Go back a menu pushing “B” (if it is set up this way) and then go into the settings menu.

From here, go to the input page, ensure the Maximum number of users is >1, then move the cursor to the bottom to enter “Port 2 Controls.” This is where you can assign whatever keys you want to player 2.

Hopefully this was helpful. Unless there is a specific reason for using PocketSNES, you should be all good to use Retroarch.

Keypad could be modified to add more keys with shift+d-pad

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You raise a good point! In fact I was meaning to one day look into programming the Arduino!
I’ll have to read up on it, but was the light bar simply a hard coded “alias” of shift+ABXY, with a third additional tier for shift+LRL2R2? If not, then there is much more potential for additional keys.

A thought for an interesting secondary use for shift: have it in essence, change the entire key set to a secondary layer, effectively allowing an entirely mapped out “player 2”. That would also mean possibly a secondary function of shift, turning into a “shift lock”.

That could lead to net play over Retroarch having far more practical use with multiple Gameshells. Although, possibly that’s already achieved with indexing.

Anyway, not wanting to side track this topic too much, this is still related to having a mapped player 2 within a single gameshell. :slight_smile: (but it’s sure sparking some ideas!)