Hey I got it to work. When pairing via Bluetooth I don’t wake up the VCS Classic controller until about 30 seconds or so after the searching for Bluetooth with the pi. That way the VCS controller does not turn off before it finishes.
Once I set it up in emulation station I launch a game and the controls get mapped all wrong for some reason so I go into RetroArch under settings->input->port 1 (or something like that I’m not at my pi right now) I’ll reconfigure the controls and save controller profile.
Now it works except the paddle. Unfortunately it’s using a different scheme (I believe it starts at 0 and wraps all the way to 1 when it resets to zero, I’ve seen people explain it better on Reddit). It works great on stella on my windows. But I haven’t figured it out on Retropie. I’ll keep looking and trying things to get the paddle to work.