I think a Kodi port is very hard for Debian Buster. But I do some ports for Kodi 18.x ... like kodi-pvr-zattoo, kodi-pvr-waipu. Coz I wanted to watch german live tv on zattoo and waipu ...
I don't think you'll be able to use Ubuntu 16 to install RetroPie, even if you check out the 4.5.1 version - most of the packages will not work with that old Ubuntu version.
You can try installing the current Debian release or a more recent (18.04) Ubuntu version and install RetroPie as explained in the docs.