@backstander sounds good. I'll lookup putty when I get the system up. I'm planning to backup a copy of the SD card image somehow as well since the first SD card I had became corrupted so i erased it and couldn't figure out how to get the damn image to work. So I had the seller ship me out a freshly imaged sd card and I want to load those 3 systems and looks like I'll have to do it in that putty system.

Wish I had just ordered my pi from someone who could have loaded the emulators and the controllers before sending it to me. Would have saved me all sorts of research and time and could have just dropped the roms in.

i figured as much
as far as i understand he installed retropie 4.1 and attract 2.0 the only thing it has is some themes and art files added for attract mode and a few sections pre set up in attract mode ...no roms or bios files included ...i guess it was worth a shot of seeing if it mattered or not ...

i would still like to know with just a normal install of retropie 4.1 and attract mode 2.0 when you add the emulator in attract mode, which is working and playing roms in emulation station,
could it be that a .cfg file in attract mode just is not listing the start command properly ?

from what i understand attract is just an overlay and alternative that still references retroarch to run the emulators ?...or is this just a problem with supported emulators in attract mode thing?

thanks for the answer though as i may try just that with full clean installs