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8BITDO NES30 Compatibility Issues - Can anyone help?

Posted: May 19th, 2017, 10:38 pm
by A GBA Guy
Hello, I am new to the forums and was hoping someone here may be able to solve a problem I have been having. It's kind of long and complicated, but I'll do my best to be concise:

I recently bought a Retron 5 specifically to play my old GBA games, only to quickly learn that while the console itself is great, the controller is less than ideal - especially for platforming games due to the lack of a d-pad.

So I purchased 8BITDO's NES30 bluetooth controller along with a dongle that inserted into the NES controller port (I didn't think it mattered which console the dongle was for at first) on the Retron 5. I was able to connect, but the console seemed to be recognizing the controller as having the NES button layout without recognizing any of the additional buttons, which made playing the GBA games quite impossible.

After some research, I learned of this forum and followed through with instructions on another thread (here: viewtopic.php?f=9&t=228) for connecting the controller directly to the Retron 5 with a downloadable firmware update available to the controller itself. I was able to successfully follow all steps laid out in the thread's original post, and the final result for my own controller was as follows now:

The controller is connected directly to the console via bluetooth and is recognized as "Retron Wireless 2" - or something similar - but it seems to want to mirror the button layout of the original Retron 5 controller that I already had - which is a major problem considering it has significantly less buttons. "Y" and "B" on the NES30 now act as the "+" and "-" buttons on the Retron Wireless, and the "A" is the "down arrow"... which acts as the "B" button when used on the Retron's main controller - so it is currently reversed on the NES30. Apart from that, no other buttons work on the NES30 apart from the d-pad.

In my own troubleshooting attempts under the "Controllers" tab of the Retron's menu, I have tried changing the "Hotkey Configuration" for bringing up the menu, fast-forwarding, save states, ect - all to no avail. I the only preset hotkey I have for any of those is the menu (down, start) but the rest are blank and seemingly unable to be changed at all.

"Button Mapping" is entirely ineffective, as the "+" and "-" cannot be remapped from their current positions of "Y" and "B" on the NES30, and none of the other buttons work in any configuration when attempting to change them. I have had even tried changing the "System Playing Tab" and "Controller Used" to various other combinations besides "GBA" and "Retron Wireless" that I normally use with the stock controller, but that doesn't change anything either.

So now I am at the end of my current resources, so I have come here in the hope someone knows what to do. I really want to be able to use this NES30 controller - and I know the guy in the thread I linked was eventually able to use his - I just don't know if it was with his GBA games too, or if it doesn't matter on way or the other.

Hopefully I was able to describe my problem clearly enough that you can tell what I am even talking about. I'm not very experienced with this console yet and definitely do not know all the quirks or tricks. If you need clarification on something or more information, please let me know!

If it helps, my Retron 5 is at v2.42, and Software is v0.3.3.

Thanks!

Re: 8BITDO NES30 Compatibility Issues - Can anyone help?

Posted: May 20th, 2017, 12:01 pm
by R9delta
Hey welcome to the forums...glad to see an actual new human here that's not just another spam bot. Anyway to kind of explain why the NES receiver doesn't work for your purpose, it does that because if you use an NES receiver it'll treat anything that's paired to it just as if it were an NES controller...limited number of buttons and all (it might double up X and Y and turbo A and B but that's it at best). Even if you were to pair something like a PS4 or Wii U Pro controller it'll act the same way. That's just how 8bitdo designed that receiver.

As far as pairing it through the Retron 5 side of things instead of using the receiver the best advice I can offer is to make sure both the NES30's firmware is completely up to date as well as the Retron 5. In particular the NES30's button config was totally broken when they first introduced the R5 pairing feature and a later update fixed that supposedly. Unfortunately I don't know really much more than that as I have a Retro Freak these days as my R5 bit the dust some time ago.

If the suggested firmware update doesn't fix the issue there is another solution that will likely work for sure for you...and that is to purchase and use an SNES 8bitdo receiver instead. You can still pair your NES30 to it (all receivers of theirs are compatible with all controllers of theirs including the stuff like PS4, Wii/U and now Switch) but using the SNES receiver it'll now read as an SNES controller giving you the capability to use all the buttons available on the controller and they're pretty much guaranteed to already be configured properly. You'll still have to configure hot keys but that is no worse than using an actual SNES controller.

Re: 8BITDO NES30 Compatibility Issues - Can anyone help?

Posted: May 21st, 2017, 3:47 pm
by A GBA Guy
Hello, thank you for the rapid response.

I had gathered the the NES receiver was an issue for sure... and I had considered the solution may be to just buy a SNES receiver instead... but since the guy in the thread I linked seemed to have gotten his to work by just directly connecting it to the Retron's wireless signal, I thought I might be able to do the same. I used the same firmware update as he supposedly did in his post, but - just like you said - the button configuration remains "totally broken".

I think I may just have to buckle down and buy the SNES receiver as you suggested, unless someone offers an alternate solution to the above.

Thanks for your help!

Re: 8BITDO NES30 Compatibility Issues - Can anyone help?

Posted: January 24th, 2019, 2:29 pm
by stone
i have retron labos cfw, and the hotkey config at least works for loading in game menu, however it stopped working for some reason recently when i started playing with genesis games recently. i havn't really bothered to find out what the issue is but you might be having the same issue, try seeing if the hotkey configs you set took to your original retron controller, or maybe it set to a wired pad (my issue is the sega controller only will do the menu with down +start that i have it set to, but it used to not be like that) ever since i got my joyzz with genesis receiver i havn't really touched my sf 30 though