Gamepad behaving strangely in Retroarch

In Retroarch, my character is turning right to fire when I press the button mapped to button II for Turbografx. This means my button 4 on the pad is acting like it’s assigned “d pad right” and “button II”. Working with “Port 1 controls” unassigning the function for the right part of the direction pad fixes this problem, but leaves me without the ability to move right. I’m using a Dragonrise Inc. Generic USB Joystick and am on Ubuntu Noble. My Retroarch is downloaded and installed through Flatpak. Can anybody help?

edit: I found a way to stop the problem, but I don’t know how to prevent it from recurring. What caused the problem in the first place?

The ‘Dragonrise Inc.’ game pads are notorious for producing outputs that are complete non-sense. I’ve got one and when I use jstest-gtk (a graphical joystick tester that can be found in the repositories) I get absolutely no output for the d-pad, the left analogue stick changes both axis 0 and axis 2 when moved horizontally and axis 1 when moved vertically and the right analogue stick produces button presses for the horizontal axis (buttons 1 and 3) and button presses (0 and 2) and changes on axis 2 for vertical movement. From what I’ve read it seems there’s a driver on Windows which basically translates the output of these devices into something sensible, but on Linux you should stay far away from them.

Thank you for your help.

I resolved my problem by running

flatpak uninstall --delete-data org.libretro.RetroArch

on the command line and then reinstalling, then setting the gamepad at Settings>Input>Retropad Binds>Port 1 Controls, then disabling mode switch from the game pad at Main Menu>Quick Menu>Controls>Port 1 Controls.