Well...i thought i updated my laptop, but as it turns out as im on it now i did not and its on RetroArch 1.71. Ill do an update and see what happens...My pi 3b+ works even with my current overclocking tests so if things go south...
I did reinstall retropie on all 3 machines. My method of testing involved stripping the drive of its partition table, install my OS of choice (deb based of course), and then i installed retropie. Nothing else in between.
Edit: More info
I was wrong on that. Its RetroArch 1.7.1 on the desktop machine, but i was able to unfortunatly recreate this on the pi by doing an apt update, apt upgrade.
It upgraded a few things such as the bootloader and the kernel, but as im watching it it seemed to have partially removed xpad - i say partially because it stated removing xpad and blah blah, but then in the retropie setup script it showed it as installed. Im not sure which action if not both caused the issue, but reinstalling xpad after a reboot did not resolve it.
So my Pi no longer works in Retroarch for player one. Does anyone know of any fixes for this, incompatabilities, bugs within the newest kernel or anything of the sort?
It is entirely possible that i did the same on the desktop before doing that second reboot so im kinda leaning toward it being kernel issue since xpad was NOT installed.