@BuZz Thank you! I currently reformatting an SD card to start fresh. Hopefully I will have better luck this time.

Over here is says that the gamelist.xml is just for games that you have Scraper info/pictures for:
https://github.com/Aloshi/EmulationStation/blob/master/README.md#gamelistxml

It's not a complete list of all the games you have.

What file(s) do you have in /opt/retropie/configs/all/retroarch-joypads ? (Can you post them on pastebin.com?)
Are you sure no yellow text appears in the extreme bottom left of the screen when you start a game that uses RetroArch?

update the Raspbian packages sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get dist-upgrade and sudo apt-get install raspberrypi-kernel-headers

@Arcuza i thought loadstate was on the direction pad by default? I disabled them so i cant verify by looking at my settings.

I bought a bluetooth dongle and after testing and playing the whole weekend, finally, no crashes or weird exits on emulators.

First of all, I had to edit /boot/config.txt with nano and add dtoverlay=pi3-disable-bt at the end of the file, with this disable bluetooth on board, save the file and then turn off Retropie.

Then, I connected the bluetooth dongle, turn on retropie and add the controller to Retropie as wiki says https://github.com/RetroPie/RetroPie-Setup/wiki/Setting-up-a-Bluetooth-controller

Thank everyone!

finally got something running - installed for xbox360 controller but can't seem to use it with pacman or bombjack. more googling!

Thanks a lot guys.

Now it works..

via SSH:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
sudo reboot

then i update the retropie-setup script and install the gamecon driver over the menu...

Ah okay cool, thanks for the replies!

@nemo93 hi,

Whilst the can't provide specific help for compiling the mame core, you may find my guide to obtaining and compiling the ffmpeg suite from source, directly on the Pi, illuminating:

Compiling Software from Source Code on the Raspberry Pi: The FFmpeg Suite

Compiling FFmpeg and Codecs from Source Code: All-in-One Script

@KeithDrayton great to hear that!

Yes. You can change the password to anything you like.

https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/2593/updating-retropie-issue-2-6

For anyone who might happen upon this in the future, this off-topic discussion has been moved here by @edmaul69.

Thanks Floob, I'm a subscriber. Your videos got me through the installation.