@Unknown The first Mario Kart game I played was the first in the series, Super Mario Kart on the SNES 30 years ago (EU). At that time, it was and still is very special to me. A 2 player mode racing mode and even a new Battle Mode was revolutionary to my friends and me, after F-Zero. The controls and tracks was perfect and nothing came close to it years after.

Mario Kart 64 was a burner.. for most people. I am one of those who didn't quite like it that much, even though it had really cool 4 player Battle mode and a lot of cool track designs. But I wasn't a fan of the controls somehow and tracks wasn't perfectly executed to me. Well, that's a long time ago and nowadays I think that I was too harsh on this game. Its really good.

Since then I only played sporadically Mario Kart games. Missed the Gamecube era completely, later Mario Kart 7 on my DS and Mario Kart 8 on the Wii U with friends. Mario Kart 8 is really good, I mean its probably the best ever in the series. My only gripe with the series are the extras. I know MK8 have some settings to enable or disable certain type of items, but most people don't play with my settings. So that doesn't matter then.

So did Super Mario Kart remain my favorite? Not anymore. The series evolved a lot and the recent version is probably my favorite. Shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone I guess. I never played Double Dash BTW and need to try it out.

@marecare Yeah you will get a lot of down votes, because asking for roms is not allowed in this forum. Wii games aren't playable on Raspberry Pi 3, even Nintendo 64 is very buggy and problematic. So, the answer is no-no (as said already above).

@fen84

has anyone been able to get Mario Kart Arcade GP (or 2) MAME working?

'Mario Kart Arcade GP' runs on the Triforce arcade system which is based on GameCube hardware. Unfortunately the Raspberry Pi isn't nearly powerful enough to emulate a system that demanding.

As for the rest of your issues, You can't just "pop" any old ROM in the arcade folder. You need to get a specific numbered ROM set for the arcade emulator you've chosen. For example, the default arcade emulator in RetroPie is lr-mame2003, which uses the MAME 0.78 ROM set. Anything outside of the intended ROM set for your chosen emulator will usually result in failure. Also, as a rule of thumb, any game north of 1995 has an increasingly higher chance of running poorly on the Pi.

Everything you need to know for arcade emulation in RetroPie is covered here.