I’m having some trouble to understand how to run dos games in the retroarch dosbox pure core. I can find the games and load them but then, I’m stuck at a menu where the selected option is qbasic.exe and below is runme.bat but I can’t go down. I tried remapping the keys to no success.

This happened with files downloaded from retrogames.cz but I have one other game thag I don’t remember where I took it from that simply runs straight away.

How is that? Anyone can explain me what is going on here? Thanks a lot!

UPDATE: I saw somewhere that in MuOS, a short press on the power button did something to the d-pad, so I tried and it allowed me to go down and select runme.bat. Another short press toggles this off and it goes back to default retroarch anbernic mapping.

Now, here comes the big problem. I've been trying to map ASWD to the d-pad and the arrow keys to abxy buttons inside the retroarch menu and found some (at first) strange limitation. "Input port 1" (whatever it was) would allow me to choose from a subset of the keyboard. Inpurt port 2 another subset (numpad?), IP3 another subset (letters) and IP4 the rest of keys, aproximately.

Thinking this was a limitation in the in-console menu, I saved a game mapping within the console and the looked for it in the pc (it's something like muos/info/retroarch/config/remap/dosboxpure/nibbles.rmp). There I fought for a while with chatgpt to get the correct codes to assign to the buttons. I managed to find a SDL2 folder in retroarch, but in the github, the sdl2 key list was in hexadecimal.

At the end I got to the conclusion that retroarch doesn't follow a whole table that you can assign, but that it divides in blocks (the mentioned Input port 1-4) and there is no real way to mix them to make your own custom mapping. I think this is to avoid conflicts with 4 controlers, because retroarch is focused in console emulation and dosbox is a weird component.

Does anyone know more about this and knows a way to map aswd and the arrows together so we can play 2p nibbles?

I manage to play gorilla by mapping numbers 1-4 in the shoulders, 5-8 d-pad and the 0 and 9 and enter in the buttons, so I can set angle, velocity and shoot :)