OMG! This ARRM tool looks trully A-W-E-S-O-M-E! I didn't have any knowledge about this tool! This could be the answer for all my troubles! Thank you!

@sirhenrythe5th Considering it will cost me about as much to buy the decoder and if it really won't do anything else, I might as well get some different speakers. Thank you.

@mitu welp, you solved my problem. So emulationstation if launched from c:\programfiles\emulationstation\emulationstation.exe it is v2.9.0RP-DEV which works fine. I originally set it to install in D:\emulationstation so the exe in that location launches v2.0.1A which I just realized I accidentally deleted my desktop exe and then went to that location to grab it again. Dont know why there are 2 locations but v2.0.1A is what causes a problem. Somehow when typing this I went to 2.9.0 without thinking to check the version and then just closed it but every time I tried to use a controller I was launching v2.0.1. Sorry and thank you ._. Going to leave this up unless mods wanna delete it cause maybe others might make a dumb mistake like me.

@MajorDangerNine lr-vice has a virtual keyboard and you can control the mouse with your controller. Lr-bluemsx works. Msx does have some games that require some keyboard keys. Linapple works but there might be some games that require a keyboard press. Not sure though. After setting up controls you can play a ton of games in dosbox without a controller. Thats the extent of my computer gaming systems.

@mitu Thank you mitu, I appreciate your reply, will go have a look into that.

Well I 100% agree with you. I use my retro pie as a controller only solution for the TV. I think a list of controller only compatible games for these systems is a great idea. There are lots of fantastic games on the 8 bit and 16 bit computers that are never discovered by younger gamers or gamers in countries where the computers were not popular and everyone was on console instead. People avoid trying to emulate the old computers as lots of people play controller only. By trial and error you can find games which don't need a keyboard. It would be great if more people played these games and discovered some of the many, many hidden gems on the 8 bit and 16 bit computers.

@mediamogul Good idea on the directory thing. I may try that. From the sound of it online BlueMSX (which is libretro compatible) plays some of the carts. So maybe I'll try that first, and then switch over to Coolcv for other specific games that wont play. 100% agree that a pretty interface doesn't mean anything if the game runs like poo. It's just I've got so many of other systems running smoothly with overlays and fancy doodad's that the ones that don't drive me crazy in the back of my head. :)

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.

Yeah, seems to be useless, I will keep it for use in a Rapsberry Pi. I will try another frontend for my intel hardware

they're both bootable. get the right one for whatever pi you're using: https://retropie.org.uk/download/#Pre-made_images_for_the_Raspberry_Pi

@blterry1 @dankcushions i have never used it but i have seen this mentioned: https://www.reddit.com/r/RetroPie/comments/5jztlj/how_to_setup_retropie_with_moonlight_steam/ I think I've tried this and Steam didn't like it when EmulationStation tried to launch another process so I wasn't able to actually launch any emulators. There might be another way to do it by manually added the Windows version of EmulationStation to Nvidia Experience search list and from your launch script you add something like -app EmulationStation (or whatever the file is actually called in Windows). After you get moonlight install/setup and you're successfully paired with your Windows PC, you can run moonlight list on the Pi and EmulationStation will be on the list.

I don't know about a bootable drive, but this guide might be close to what you want: https://github.com/retropie/retropie-setup/wiki/RetroPie-Ubuntu-16.04-LTS-x86-Flavor