Power button

[Flavor]

"half an hour"
That's insane!

This does make me wonder if it's a bad connection somewhere, and that the Pi just doesn't properly detect it most of the time.

Most of the emulators are set up to exit by
tapping the power button (which puts it in HOTKEY mode) and then tapping SELECT (or START+SELECT in some emulators)

If you wanted to change some configuration stuff, it's fairly easy to remove the HOTKEY functionality and just use START+SELECT to exit emulators.

The main reason that I changed it to use the power button (for HOTKEY mode) was because I would sometimes hit START+SELECT when I only meant to hit START. It's rather annoying to accidentally exit a game instead of just hitting START.

I don't really know how to debug this issue over the forum or email. My gut feeling (with the info provided) is that there's a bad connection to the Pi. The power-button bootup functionality isn't handled by the Pi (it's direct on the GPA board). Once the Pi starts up, it sets a GPIO to keep the power turned on.

Then, the power button ALSO is hooked to a GPIO line. When you press it, the Pi should "see" that. If you hold it in, after 5 seconds (which is just my guess from memory) it will send a signal to shutdown.

If this connection between the button and the Pi GPIO is bad, then it would not properly (maybe never, but maybe intermittently) shut down or enter HOTKEY mode.

If you have a keyboard+HDMI to hook up, or if you can SSH into the Pi, we can run the joystick test to get data about every button.

I think it's something like
jstest /dev/input/js0

That should show all the joystick buttons as ON/OFF, and you can see if the power button changes the value.

You can also use
gpio read

to give you info about the state of a GPIO pin, but I don't have the data here in front of me this weekend to tell you what other parameters to give it.

If you want to test that stuff (and can get to a terminal prompt and type), I can get you the info on what/how to test it. LMK