I was hoping someone could help me out here..

I keep seeing conflicting information/incomplete documentation on how many inputs/gamepads Pico-8 supports:

• Is there a way to assign keyboard keys as the buttons for gamepads 2-7? (the built-in config tool only covers inputs 0 and 1)
• Are gamepads 2-7 /only/ accessible by plugging in a physical USB gamepad? Will that automatically be assigned a number, or is this definable in some way?

Thanks in advance.

It would appear that keyboard mappings are only supported for gamepads 0/1. The key values appear to be stored as numbers in config.txt. Look for the line starting with "button_keys" -- it's followed by 13 numbers (player 1 keys, player 2 keys and the pause button). I'm not entirely sure what these numbers reference, though. Scancodes? Expanding this value with extra numbers has no effect, they get removed when PICO-8 starts.

You can customise which input would be used for the first actual gamepad by using the -joystick command-line parameter, followed by a number. For instance, if you want virtual gamepads 1-7 to map to physical gamepads, start pico8 as "pico8.exe -joystick 1". If you want gamepads 5-7 to be physical, use "pico8.exe -joystick 5", etc. This corresponds to the "joystick_index" entry of the config.txt file.

While this is somewhat of an issue, let's be fair -- it's not like more than 2 people can comfortably share a keyboard.

Of course, all of this information is just me looking stuff up that's freely available. I do not know the truth, someone from the dev team should answer this question for you to be completely sure.

Thanks. I'll have to get out some USB gamepads and experiment a bit then.

I was more looking at it to allow for more inputs in a 1 or 2 player cart.

Ex: assigning player 3 to a single joypad's buttons 0-6, and player 4 to that same pad's buttons 7-12.