sudomod

My profession is Digital Design and i'm extremely new to boards, soldering, shit everything and I need help!. while watching the videos on the gbz i noticed that the teensy was one of the main ones being used so i bought a teensy 2.0 off eBay, didn't notice that it was being shipped from good ole china so i am figuring that it's going to take awhile. that being said I don't want to wait, so I did a ton more research on the different boards I could buy. I didn't know there were so many! Is there anyone out there that could guide me on the path of retro gaming enlightenment?

No, there's not much difference. As long as it has enough connections to do what you want, and is small enough to fit in your build, they're largely interchangeable. The one difference worth noting is the chip - AtMega32U4 based boards are easier to program for our purposes; AtMega328 boards don't work as well. But whether it's a Teensy, Pro Micro, Leonardo or other? Doesn't matter.

thank you, I want to run a L1 L2 R1 R2 set up which would work for that?

You can use the Arduino Leonardo Pro micro:
I use it only with L1 and R1
http://www.sudomod.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=44&t=3537
You can use the code from Helder with the canges from my second post to use all pins for inputs

Example for Pins:
Pin Out after Flash with arduino over USB:
left site
PIN___Find at Gamepad detection____I use for
TXD__HAT 0 Down_______________Down
RXT__HAT 0 UP__________________UP
GND
GND
2____HAT 0 LEFT________________Left
3____HAT 0 RIGHT_______________Right
4____Button 3__________________A
5____Button 4 __________________Start
6____Button 5 __________________Y
7____Button 6 __________________L1
8____Button 7__________________X
9____Button 8__________________R1
right site
PIN__Find at Gamepad detection____I use for
raw
gnd
rst
vcc
A3
A2
A1
A0
15___Button 14_______________Select
14___Button 13_______________R2
16___Button 15_______________L2
10___Button 9 ________________B