Picade X HAT sound not working

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I have the Picade 8 inch with the 8 inch LCD screen, joystick and button, wired loudspeaker, and Picade X HAT connected to an RPi 3B+. When I play games in EmulationStation everything works as expected but the audio is missing entirely. The HAT works otherwise: LED is on, joystick and buttons are connected, 8-inch screen is connected to the Pi. I switched the audio source to BCM in EmulationStation as instructed.

When I play games without the HAT with a USB controller connected to the Pi and a loudspeaker conncted to the Pi through the audio jack with USB power, the sound works (I can use the audio settings in Retropie to select the audiojack and set the volume). But when I reconnect the HAT, the option to select audio through HDMI and audiojack is disabled. So it seems that the HAT disables the audio jack sound output.

Three questions:

  1. Does anyone have the same experience and found work-arounds?

  2. Is there a way to enable the audiojack while the X HAT is connected?

  3. Is the X HAT necessary? As far as I can see, it is used to route the joystick and button input and sound output to the GPIO. Can you just connect the joystick and buttons directly to the GPIO pins and connect audio to the audiojack?

I tried this but the Pi does not boot up anymore. I removed the X HAT, connected the loud speaker to the audiojack, and connected the joystick and buttons directly to the available GPIO pins accepting input. I ran “retrogame” utility in the terminal, which is supposed to tell the RPi which key corresponds to each GPIO pin (see Installing Retrogame | Retro Gaming with Raspberry Pi | Adafruit Learning System ). After I installed retrogame, the RPi does not completely boot anymore. It shows the Retropie splash screen, then shows a message that “retrogame: Pin config failed” and start to stop all processes and powers down. Since it powers down before any prompt, I cannot change anything so I had no choice but to wipe my SD card and install Retropie again.

  1. Does anyone have experience with this retrogame utility to map keys directly to the pins and encountered the same issue?

Thanks in advance!

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2

I found the solution. It turns out my installation of Retropie and the Picade X HAT driver on the SD card was probably corrupt. After a clean install of Retropie and Picade X HAT the sound is working as expected. So question 1 is resolved and therefore questions 2, 3, and 4 are not relevant anymore.

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