[garbear]

Is there a common place to get icons for the 3 new controller profiles? Who created current artwork for the other controllers?

We have so much controller artwork because, in 2017, the largest wildfire (until 2018, that is) in California burned my neighborhood down. I had nothing else to do living in hotels so I spent 3 months creating the artwork, descriptions and buttonmaps in the controller topology project repo. It was a lot of searching, researching, reading and photoshopping.

2. While digging through the topology and the button mapping, I've come to a conclusion that currently we have "A"<->"B" and "X"<->"Y" swapped for both NES and SNES (in all emulators). We are mapping "A"->"A", but the original NES controller has "B" on the left and "A" on the right, the opposite of Kodi's default controller based on Xbox.

You've discovered the fundamental dichotomy in controller mapping. What is actually happening is that two cultures have evolved different ways to lay out buttons on a controller.

You have the Japanese layout, as can be seen in the SNES controller.

You also have the Western layout, as can be seen in the Xbox controller.

There are also two ways to map controllers:
 

• The physical mapping, which maps A on japanese controllers to B on western controllers, because these buttons are in the same physical spot.
  
• The logical mapping, which maps A on japanese controllers to A on western controllers, because they both "logically" are the "confirm" / "main action" button
  

RetroArch uses the physical mapping. The "reference" controller for face buttons is the SNES controller. Everything in libretro is a physical mapping to the SNES controller.

If you want to solve the problem for reals, we need a preference in Kodi: Do you want the logical mapping or the physical mapping. Visually, this can be viewed as Logical = A -> A and Physical = A -> B.

I have seen people prefer both. I prefer the logical mapping, because I'm used to the western layout. I observed @natethomas rock at Super Mario, but only after we swapped the buttons because he grew up and was visual-motorly adapted to the Japanese layout.

Does this offer more insight into the challenges we need to overcome?

I've seen a lot of references to openemu.org in the Genesis 6 button controller profile. Is there a way to export the profiles automatically? I've found out that there are even translations for every controller. Is it done manually?

OpenEmu is BSD-licensed. This means we can curate their artwork under the same license. I have done so: https://github.com/kodi-game/OpenEmuControllerArt

It may need to be updated or modernized, as you can see I curated last in December 2017 (about 3 days before the fire).

EDIT: Also I can see that the branding needs to be removed from the icon?

Yup, but this isn't hard in photoshop. Fortunately the entire Team stepped up and did the branding removal for me once I curated the images.