OK, I finally got it fixed. and I really should have looked at this first, so I'm sorry for putting everyone who looked at this on a wild goose chase. But I've been putting off working on this because I've had other projects and while I can rebuild, I didn't want to. But the overscan didn't work, it would not pull it to the left like I wanted, I made sure the TV was on game mode and not stretching or adding any post processing. I had a spare TV and wanted to rule out the TV, and behold I seen this
IMG_20231028_182219.jpg
I commented out the hdmi_drive=2 and it all works.
I'm not even going to pretend I know what was going on, but my guess the damaged connector was pushing sound through what was left working of the cable and had to push the video to the side to make room for that. I dunno, but new cord, and verified it's working. I'm going to buy some backup HDMI cables just in case and really try to come up with a better solution to where I sit the Retropie