Mame2010 appears to have savestate = false in their config, so maybe the 'cannot save' message is normal. Other MAME cores do have 'savestate = true' though (MAME2003, MAME2003+, MAME).

@alexp just to clarify, LEDSpicer supports both Single color and RGB
if you need minimal functionality then you are set.

@PhatRam32 you need to delete the
default.cfg in your mame2003/cfg directory. This is located where you launch your roms from

We don't support 3rd party images and yours looks like it was customized and changed from the default RetroPie image.
I see you have a number of services (like snapd or bt-device) which are not standard on RaspiOS and I see also an error related to CPU throttling - maybe the system boot is slow because the CPU's frequency is scaled down.
You can use systemd-analyze how long it takes each system service to start, it may help identify which one is responsible for the slowdown.

I can't find anything relevant to permissions. I've changed the title.

Now, to continue on your problem - add some info about your system, as detailed in https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/3/read-this-first. In particular, what version of RetroPie are you using and how did you install it ?

@BuZz I did

Change your Emulation Station theme to Carbon, and/or cut way back on your collections.

Had the same issue, took me a day to figure out

I FTP into the pi then take out all the ROMs and saves whenever I have to reimage for whatever reason, which is more common then it should be. If you have to reimage it because of your pesky ferrets, I would do that first. There are plenty of great guides just a google away.

i'm using the pidrive 1 TB edition for my picade with retropie.

i'm powering my whole picade, pidrive, screen, usb keyboard all with a single power adaptor (the official 3a one). Works perfect. Although i'm not using the berryboot SD card and i did not install the (retropie) system itselve on the harddisk but on a sd card. Only my roms and assets are located on the pidrive, this way i can easily swap systems and roms remain intact. I'm using the system from retropie toolkit to use my external disk as a roms storage. (see https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/7780/loading-roms-from-usb-harddrive)

watch out this script uses http://eazyhax.com/pitime/expand_to_external_drive.sh and adds avoid_warnings=2 to /boot/config.txt so remove it afterwards or you won't get notified anymore about undervoltage and high temprature warnings !