6-button Pads in RetroArch

For the next post in my series aiming to de-mystify using abnormal input devices in RetroArch, I'd like to take a look at gamepads with six face buttons. I touched on these briefly in my previous post about N64 mapping, but we get a lot of confused users wondering why they can't find C and Z buttons in the input menu or outright claiming RetroArch doesn't work with 6-button pads.

Ultimately, this confusion typically stems from an incomplete (or altogether nonexistent) understanding of how RetroArch handles input--specifically, through the retropad abstraction that cores and frontends use to communicate--but the most basic aspect of this misunderstanding may admittedly come from our use of Nintendo-style button names and 4-face-button images in our UI:

Now, the retropad concept is core to libretro and RetroArch, so we can't make any major changes there, like adding additional buttons or changing the names of existing buttons, without modifying every single core ever made, which would be a lot of work and just generally not worth the trouble for what is a niche input modality (no offense to 6-button peeps).

Thankfully, buttons is buttons, and changing icons for those buttons is very easy. Just download this pack of modified icons, unzip the archive and drop the 'assets' folder into your RetroArch folder, overwriting any conflicts. Again, this will not change the names of the buttons from the Nintendo-style names, but it will update all of the helper icons, like this:

Hopefully, this will help 6-button users have an easier time mapping their devices and allow them to navigate the user interface more intuitively.

These icons will get wiped out if you update your assets, but you can always just go through this process again to get them back. I've applied the icons, wiped them out by updating and then reapplied them a dozen times or so while writing this post.