Nevermind i figured it out. The guide dosen't it make it noob clear that after you have built your own version you still have to actually move the binary to the appropriate folder but as i said in the end i figured it out :)

@mitu Oh I'm aware it's just a front end, I've tried doing RetroPie for my brother in law as a Christmas gift (which I got working easily enough).

And I didn't think to try Github's instructions, I guess I just assumed the main page would work. Tired and ready for bed. Thanks, I'll give it a shot later.

@LionSquall read the sticky topics and open a new topic with info. This is a 3 year old discussion.

@madmodder123 I changed the vector images of buttons to symbolic (playstation). I converted them from a raster to a vector in an inscape.
In this thread, @jacobfk20 helped me with the compilation, and everything worked.

@gomisensei I'll make no judgement against the "MAME Project". I respect their intention and their end goal.

Now, saying that. The attitude of some of the people involved...
Hmmm, I thought, naively, that we all cared about the same thing. No. Not at all.

@mitu the emulated chroot is created via RetroPie-Setup. See admin/image module. It's created from raspbian lite image, so it's identical to a real install which is good for catching problems and dependency issues.

It's used for building the images too which uses qemu again on a pc.

@BuZz That explains a lot, thanks ! My Murphy curse was at it again...
@Darksavior you were right anyway ;)

I have compile a working ScummVM v1.10 if you want it ;)

There : https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/13723/scummvm-1-10-0-october-2017-for-retropie-ite-french-trad

@lordg2009 same results here. a menu opened up very momentarily but then things crashed so... yeah idk. maybe it needs x and doesnt like running on the framebuffer.

have you tried bombic?

https://sourceforge.net/projects/bombic/

OK, I see the coolcv_x86_64 and coolcv_i686 binaries in the latest "all" bundle.
Not sure how I missed this earlier.
In any case, coolcv isn't enabled on retropie x86, so I can't install it from the retropie_setup as it doesn't show up in any of the package lists.

Might be worth adding now? Perhaps try to determine which build would be required (i686,x86_64) at module install time?
Or perhaps just go with i686 for compatibility? (I hardly think it's going to stress the computer's memory :) )

more info and a test program

http://vah.dy.fi/lcdtopgun/

So technically the above worked – I CAN use the Edimax EW-7611ULB combo bluetooth/wifi dongle after following the directions in that link I posted..

...but weird stuff is happening:

1.) The keyboard (Rii mini, 2.4ghz dongle variety) is now ALWAYS player one. I mean ALWAYS. I unplug the keyboard, hit "A" on a hard-wired controller to start a game, and the keyboard is somehow still player 1 and I have to plug the keyboard back in in order to hit "Select + Start" to exit out of a game. Never had that happen before. Furthermore, my bluetooth controllers ALWAYS took priority (i.e. Player 1, then Player 2, etc) over hard-wired controllers no matter what port they were plugged into (don't play mutiplayer that often but I'm pretty sure that's how it always worked).

2.) WiFi doesn't auto connect. When I go into WiFi setup it even gives me an IP address ending in 140 which totally looks like it's connected if it has an IP address...but it's not really connected (can't SSH or FTP in for example). When I click on connect to a wireless network, re-enter my same password, it then connects, but the IP address changes to end in 12 (which has also never happened since my router I believe always saves the same IP address for a specific dongle...which is how my FTP bookmarks never fail to work).

3.) Since something is screwy, when I unplug the combo dongle, and (reboot) then plug back in the regular bluetooth dongle (which ALWAYS worked before - no special compiling of drivers needed) -- for the life of me I can't get my 8BitDo wireless controller to connect now (tried 2 different bluetooth controllers).

@trigger_death
thanks you