I have asked on LinuxQuestions in the past about making my gamepad work within retroach, but at the moment, I find myself without a gamepad. I looked in the retroarch interface. I find it very difficult to move around in there. I THINK that I found the controls under the second menu from the left, but it said that the Start button should be <ENTER>, but when I load my game and hit <ENTER>, nothing happens. I know that the U, D, L, and R buttons are on my middle arrows (below the Insert/Delete button bar), but I don't know where A and B buttons are. Please advise, and thank you for any advice you can offer...

Try looking in ~/.config/retroarch/retroarch.cfg.

Thank you very much for your reply. I figured out (the day I started this thread in fact) that the buttons I needed were <ENTER> for start, 'x' for A and 'z' for B. I'm sure that knowing about the file in ~/config will help me figure out the rest of the key bindings (for the other emulators within retroarch.)