Well, I managed to fix this issue. The fix is odd and probably specific to Dell machines but go into the BIOS and go to General -> Advanced Boot options, Untick Enable Legacy option ROMS

Machine now boots fine with joystick connected....

@fmo well obviously you can't use a one button paddle in a system which requires at least 4 to work (I mean Recalbox here)

If you think it will be easier to just get a different wifi dongle, I'd happily order one. I just don't want to do that only to find that the problem is not related to the dongle.

But, if there is a particular wifi dongle that is known to work well, I'd much rather pay the 10 dollars for it then spend a lot of time trying to diagnose this issue.

@minze just ping your gateway, or check if ifconfig returns anything other than loopback

@paradadf You're right! Thanks!

If it boot on gpu, then everything is explained ?
"don't take any risk (see what I did there ?) with the booting chip" on top of "things must not be peripherical dependant" which combos in "booting chip must not be peripherical depending"

This booting on gpu is surprising, but not totally from outer space when you considering pi's ARM nature :)
@Substring

I think it's possible to achieve what your usual computer does. There's no impossibility, but a lot to learn before doing that : to do this right, you must take this before kernel. I would have to document myself on that before coming with questions. IRQ is already little known territory to me, but ARM board IRQ may be very much alien space in my Windows guy's eyes : I learnt how from a pile of sand making something this is driven by hardware or asm drivers 20 years ago, there should be remains :)

@megatimx I just ordered a new controller, maybe something was wrong with that one. It should get here in a few hours thanks to the wonders of Amazon.

@qawert use select as hotkey ;)

@disorder This could be caused by how configgen "detects" pads. Can you make a pastebni of ~/.emulationstation/es_log.txt ?

@dani1234 runs much better on a pi3, yes. And the recalbox version for Pi3 ;) Check out the 4.0.0 final release :)

If you want the exact mapping of the N64, you need to edit yourself the buttons and switch to a custom config. What you need is :

edit the files in /recalbox/share/configs/mupen (or mupen64 or mupen64plus, i never remember) add in the recalbox.conf and add at the bottom (or wheverever else) n64.configfile=dummy so that the files you edited won't be overwritten

This will be slightly easier in Recalbox 4.1