Retroflag Controller-M review

Earlier this month I purchased a Retroflag Controller-M and I thought I may as well make write a review of it. Testing involved playing Xeno Crisis, a full playthrough of Arkagis Revolution and iwis slapping the buttons because she likes clicky sounds.

Here's the link for the official Amazon listing for the controller. As a disclaimer, I bought it from a local store in Argentina instead (to avoid having to deal with import headaches).

Retroflag's controller looks pretty similar to a Mega Drive 6-button controller, down to the size. There are some practical concessions however: there's a Select button on top of the Start button, and instead of a Mode button there are L and R buttons. The latter two are built to look like the original Mode button, which is nice.

(iwis claims that it's not L and R buttons but "weft mode" and "wight mode" buttons)

The D-pad seems to happily take all the abuse going on so far (turns out Arkagis Revolution is surprisingly hard on the D-pad), albeit of course the question is how many months it will last. At least pressing the directions feels nice. The L and R buttons may be a bit too easy to press, so be careful where you place your fingers, but everything else seems OK.

The Controller-M shows up as either a generic XBOX controller (if in XInput mode) or a generic retro controller (if in DirectInput mode), so get ready to rebind buttons (at least the button mappings seem decent). This may or may not be an issue depending what you're using, the controller lets you swap Z/C with L/R if really needed. The controller also works with a Switch, according to their site.

If you're OK with the original 6-button controller's size and are ready to rebind buttons, you should be fine.

Known issues

• medfanen doesn't like the controller in XInput mode (Z and C aren't responsive), you'll need to switch to DirectInput mode to work around this issue.

Input details

The controller maps its buttons like this:

• D-pad maps as-is
• A/B/X/Y map as-is
• Z maps to L1
• C maps to R1
• L maps to L2
• R maps to R2
• Start maps as-is
• Select maps as-is

Retroflag's site includes how the controller buttons map to a modern controller's buttons, but the box also mentions some features that I'm going to include here in case somebody loses the box and needs help:

• Hold down X while plugging in to switch to XInput mode (stays even after you unplug).
• Hold down Y while plugging in to switch to DirectInput mode (stays even after you unplug).
• Hold down Select+L+R for three seconds to swap Z/C and L/R.
• Hold down Select+L+A/B/X/Y to toggle turbo for A/B/X/Y (apparently C and Z can't use turbo).