[garbear]

You are referencing controller schemes from consoles. Isn't retroplayer using the retropad?

Nope, an unbelievable amount of work went in on my part to leave the retropad behind. The retropad is hardcoded for every emulator. This leads to ugly hacks like you see in Mupen64. Worse, these hacks can be inconsistent between every core.

However, my main reason is something I'll call "technological overhead". This means that to configure the retropad, you need to understand the concept of a retropad. This is not a hard concept. Yet we take it for granted because we've been exposed to technology our whole lives.

Last year I gave a career talk to sixth graders in a poor neighborhood. When I said "I work with emulators", I got blank stares. Most had parents who couldn't afford game consoles growing up. Some had friends with an xbox or playstation. That one console could "emulate" another was not a concept these eleven-year-olds had ever been exposed to.

How do you configure an emulator without the concept of "emulation"? Much less configure, how do you even choose an emulator? The entire ecosystem of emulator software is unapproachable to a large portion of the population. And that's my goal - to hide emulation entirely, making the games accessible to people regardless of their lack of exposure to technology.

Maybe the problem would be more about the physical controller the user is connecting to their kodi device, if it does not have enough buttons to bind them to the retropad. In this case the "holdtime" for "Start" might have an advantage vs the button combination (as long as "Start" can be bound to the physical gamepad).

Yes, this is the reason I chose a holdtime instead of a combo. I haven't decided if this is the best choice yet :p

users could either edit the config to match their gamepad

Nope, the goal is zero-configuration.

use an alternative (IR?) control or get a gamepad with more buttons.

Telling the user "you're holding it wrong" doesn't solve the problem.

In RetroArch, if select is used as a combo button, how do you send a select press to the game? If you press Select + L1, does the select press also get sent to the game?

That's a good question. I expect it doesn't send the Select+L1 buttons when they are detected, but if you don't press them exactly at the same time it probably does set either Select or L1 (whichever was pressed first) during the instant of time that one was pressed before the second one was.
I would have to test that. I think most games I've played do not really use Select much, outside of menus, so I wouldn't have noticed.

Could you look into this?