[yimyom]

Hi,

I have a problem with joystick (and to some extent keyboard) focus when launching mame from Kodi. My setup is an Odroid XU4, Kodi, mame installed (almost by the book). You can read on how I did my setup on this page I wrote https://github.com/yimyom/odroid-xu4-setup.

The problem is the following: when I launch any game, my joystick doesn't work at all. If I start X with a regular session and run mame in fullscreen, it perfectly works. If I run mame in window mode, and put the focus on another window, well... of course the joystick doesn't work. I suspect I have something similar with my Kodi/AML installation but I can't find anything so far.

I went through Kodi's logs, AML logs (in debug mode) and couldn't find anything suspicious.

So far my impression is that the MAME windows doesn't take the focus and so the joystick events are not sent to MAME.

Any idea ?

Hi, very nice tutorial!

The problem is that Kodi must be run using a Window Manager. I recommend you use OpenBox. Google a bit, also in this forum there are many old posts about that. If you need further help, I'm preparing my own tutorial about Linux + Kodi + Emulators configuration but that will take me some time to finish.

EDIT: Sorry, OpenBox is used, see point 17, the contents of the file /etc/systemd/system/kodi.service

Can you please give more information about the joystick? Can you try with an alternative joystick? 

This is exactly the answer I was looking for. So, indeed, the windows focus seems to be the problem. I think for some reasons, the new fullscreen window was not getting the focus and therefore none of the keyboard and joystick events were passed to MAME. After adding openbox, it just works !!! Thanks a lot for your help.

So, I've update my tutorial and, thanks to that last piece, it's in version 1.0 now !
For the record, here is my tutorial on how to build a Kodi with Mame, a USB hard drive, put a joystick and plenty other niceties on a ODroid XU4, including OpenGL and OpenGL ES: https://github.com/yimyom/odroid-xu4-setup