@mitu I actually figured it out late last night. As I was trying every game file I thought that there had to be something wrong with how the images were being called up. I looked again at both my es_systems.cfg & emulators.cfg and realized that I had it pointing to pcengine not pcenginecd. I must have looked at those ten times without realizing my mistake.
I knew I was doing something stupid. I guess I really should have stepped away from it for a bit.