Hello!

Currently, I am trying Pop Os on my home MAME arcade machine that I refurbished from an old broken cabinet.

The buttons are connected via a A-Pac USB Controller (2 Players).
Additionally, I have some cheap old random game leftover game pads.
The Pc is an old office Intel, that was thrown away by a company. So, basically a zombie of old trash with a new purpose.Instead of only running MAME I wanted it to run some basic steam games, and mostly at least starts well.

But also on most games, even if X-input is not required, I run into some trouble;
besides the known hustle that most games don't have in-game rebinding options. Sometimes two controllers are identified as one, or everything works, instead of the game menu. Or only half of the connected controles work.

I can create a new mapping via steam overlay but it does not make any change.

I am quite new to this. Maybe this is just a linux issue. But I can't imagine that no one had played around with this before. Is there any simple option to mount specific games to specific button layouts?
An outside of steam workaround like Joy2key for windows, where one could link games to configs?

Or maybe just a deeper joystick configutartion tool.
A bonus would be, if there was an option to have two controllers become one on specific games, like twin stick shooters. Or to have command lines on different button press patterns, like a macro for "kill" or other terminal commands?

This also could be very helpful for the upcoming steam deck, if someone wanted to use odd controllers ( preordered )

Love you