figured it out, the assets for retroarch were in ~/.config/retropie/assets rather than in /opt/retropie/assets, copied em over and it's all good.

Thank you! I guess I'll copy a save from past the tutorial then...

@lilbud
You are 100% right. It's not possible to own a 1 or 2 TB SD-card for a few bucks now (in 2016!).

@RetroTime
Consider to use a seperate storage for your roms. A small SD card (4GB are more then enough!) only for the system is a great choice. Read the wiki to mount a USB device to store ROMS on it. You can even use a system link (like a desktop shortcut Windows uses) to point to your external device. Just use the internal search....

@jay81uk i use the unpowered rockband hubs on the pi zero. Only issue i have is if you are setting up wifi unplug everything except the keyboard. This is a pi zero problem not a hub problem. It happens on powered hubs as well for me.

The cheap nes snes etc etc to usb controllers have a delay. Worse when using a usb extension. NOt sure what controller you are using this or as others said try game mode

@meleu Ok ;-)

Follow this step by step and confirm the first part that deviates for you
https://github.com/retropie/retropie-setup/wiki/First-Installation

thanks all for your help. appreciate it. I'm still learning, and this is great useful information for the future

thx, worked perfectly... just changed the config of my controller in the path you have written with these two lines and used the buttons for pushing left and right (plus the standard hotkey "select" of course.

nope putting the syscard3.pce in the directory as the cd images didnt help. havent found a program to convert a iso/wav/cue to a bin/cue yet, and as for the xbox controller issue, the pi recognises it, but a joystick test program doesnt read any inputs from it, its one of the newer xbox one controllers 16 something.

please provide more information - https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/3/read-this-first

Now i switched to a new microSD 32gb samsung card and did the same procedure, and now it worked, so probably a bad sd card.

See what the error log says after you have tried a rom that doesnt work.
You can check that in /tmp/runcommand.log

@joeblade did you go into retropie setup and update retropie setup, then install the emulator from there?

I dont think you can set a hotkey to replicate the function of a separate key, only to perform an action that RetroArch has a setting for.
You can see your hotkey settings in /opt/retropie/configs/all/retroarch-joypads/{controller-file}

You could of course map an existing key to act as a different one, but then it would still only be assigned to one function.
It might just be easier to get a controller with more buttons like these: http://www.8bitdo.com/