Keyboard Remote not Recognized in Retropie

[DonPf]

Hello,
I have ScummVM running on a RetroPie setup (RPI4), and am using a Rii K25 remote which has a built in keyboard and air-mouse to control the device.

I'd love to use it for some of my old point & click games like Monkey Island and Putt Putt games for our kids, but when I launch ScummVM, the mouse works (if there isn't another joystick/controller connected), but the keyboard is not recognized.

Pushing keys on the remote does nothing in either the ScummVM UI (e.g. renaming a game) or in launched games.
I also tried plugging in another keyboard, and that isn't recognized either.
The keyboards do work in Emulation Station, the RetroPie command line, and other RetroPie applications like Kodi.

This makes playing things tricky because I can't press anything to bring up the menu to exit a game after launching it, and games (like the Putt-Putt games) can't use "S" and "L" keys for saving and loading games.

I asked about this on the RetroPie forum: https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/340 ... in-scummvm

I've been messing with the 'joystick' parameter in the launch parameters to no avail.
Does anyone here have any thoughts or suggestions for me to try?

[Praetorian]

Hello,
Can you clarify this?

I also tried plugging in another keyboard, and that isn't recognized either.

- Does this mean you connected a plain USB keyboard to your Pi and didn't work with ScummVM (but it worked otherwise) or that you connected another Rii K25?

- Are you running ScummVM as a standalone or through EmulationStation? If it's the latter, can you try running it as a standalone? We offer release binaries for RPi : https://www.scummvm.org/downloads/#release

- What is the version of ScummVM you're testing with?

I should note that I've just tested on my RPi 3B, which is running Raspbian 11 (latest, all updates) 32bit and has ScummVM 2.7.0 (32bit appImage) installed. My plain USB keyboard, a Logitech K120, is working fine with the OS and ScummVM. I don't own a Rii K25 remote or similar device so I can't test specifically for it.

[DonPf]

Hello, and thanks for the reply.

The other keyboard I tried was a wireless keyboard with a USB 2.4ghz receiver. I was launching it through Emulation Station, and the current version of ScummVM on my Retropie is 2.7.0 (Feb 28 2023 19:25:43).

I tried exiting Emulation Station and running it directly from the binaries (/opt/retropie/emulators/scummvm/bin/scummvm), and that worked as expected. Keyboard functioned in the ScummVM search field, and after adding a game, modifying the name with the keyboard, and launching it, I was able to quit with the Ctrl+Q from the keyboard.

So the problem must be the way Emulation Station encapsulates it. That's progress!

I don't know if anyone here knows why that might be happening, but I'll post the update in the Retropie forum as well and see if anyone there knows how to fix this.

[Praetorian]

Hello, and thanks for the reply.

The other keyboard I tried was a wireless keyboard with a USB 2.4ghz receiver. I was launching it through Emulation Station, and the current version of ScummVM on my Retropie is 2.7.0 (Feb 28 2023 19:25:43).

I tried exiting Emulation Station and running it directly from the binaries (/opt/retropie/emulators/scummvm/bin/scummvm), and that worked as expected. Keyboard functioned in the ScummVM search field, and after adding a game, modifying the name with the keyboard, and launching it, I was able to quit with the Ctrl+Q from the keyboard.

So the problem must be the way Emulation Station encapsulates it. That's progress!

I don't know if anyone here knows why that might be happening, but I'll post the update in the Retropie forum as well and see if anyone there knows how to fix this.

Interesting, good to know the standalone ScummVM works as intended.

I am not very familiar with EmulationStation, but looking into its configuration (I am mostly looking at the ES-DE 2.0 version (https://es-de.org), which seems to be a more actively developed(?) fork of RetroPie EmulationStation (https://emulationstation.org/) and has richer documentation) it looks like there's an option to either use retroarch or scummvm "directly", at least according to their README.txt file.

Are you also using ES-DE or the original RetroPio EmulationStation? Does it run scummvm via retroarch? If so, can you configure it to use the standalone scummvm installation instead and check if it makes any difference?

I've also seen a short note about "controller configuration" being "hardcoded" for scummvm (here: https://retropie.org.uk/docs/ScummVM/) but not sure how much up to date that info is, or what "hardcoded" actually entails.

[DonPf]

According to the setup script, it's using EmulationStation (from the stable branch of github.com/RetroPie/EmulationStation).
I can see that retroarch is installed, but I don't know if it's using retroarch to handle the launching of ScummVM.

In the home directory there's a script (~/RetroPie/roms/scummvm/+Start ScummVM.sh) that looks like it's responsible for launching ScummVM via the command and populating a list of the games.

Code: Select all

game="$1"
pushd "/home/[username]/RetroPie/roms/scummvm" >/dev/null
/opt/retropie/emulators/scummvm/bin/scummvm --fullscreen --joystick=0 --extrapath="/opt/retropie/emulators/scummvm/extras" "$game"
while read id desc; do
     echo "$desc" > "/home/[username]/RetroPie/roms/scummvm/$id.svm"
done < <(/opt/retropie/emulators/scummvm/bin/scummvm --list-targets | tail -n +3)
popd >/dev/null

In /opt/retropie/emulators/configs/scummvm/emulators.cfg it lists:

Code: Select all

scummvm = "bash /home/[username]/RetroPie/roms/scummvm/+Start\ ScummVM.sh %BASENAME%"
default = "scummvm"

So, I don't know for certain, but assume that Emulation station is using the shell script to launch ScummVM.

[Praetorian]

yes, looks that way to me too. It also looks like it's using a ScummVM installation (did it install that one?) for which the binary/executable is at the path:

Code: Select all

/opt/retropie/emulators/scummvm/bin/scummvm

I suppose you could directly check its version with

Code: Select all

/opt/retropie/emulators/scummvm/bin/scummvm --version

And launch it independently of emulation station using that binary, to check if that one also works ok with a keyboard connected.

[DonPf]

I posted a few updates to the RetroPie forum, but wanted to update here as well.

The ScummVM version running on the RetroPie is 2.7.0.

Launching ScummVM independently of EmulationStation either directly by the /opt/* binary, or by the included script /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/scummvm/+Start ScummVM.sh launches it successfully and both keyboard and mouse work as expected.

So something about the way it launches in EmulationStation is throwing off the keyboard recognition.
Looking at the RetroPie Log (/dev/shm/runcommand.log) shows that it loads a Virtual Keyboard Pack, but is identical to the command line output.

Code: Select all

Executing (via xinit): bash /home/pi/RetroPie/roms/scummvm/+Start ScummVM.sh monkey-vga

Virtual keyboard pack 'vkeybd_default' loaded successfully

Quite an odd situation. For now, I'm going to launch it from the command line as a workaround and will check to see if any new versions stumble over something that fixes this.

[DonPf]

Just wanted to post that this was resolved. (Per RetroPie forum thread: https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/340 ... scummvm/21)

We found the issue in /opt/retropie/configs/all/backends.cfg. ScummVM was configured to launch using Xorg, which breaks the keyboard support:
$ cat /opt/retropie/configs/all/backends.cfg
smw="dispmanx"
scummvm="x11-c"

Removing the line for scummvm from this file resolved the problem.