@movisman good to hear you're going to go back to it!

In the end the e35 wasn't powerful enough and required legacy AMD drivers. I ended up with an ASRock AIO board rocking an Intel J3160 and it is flying.

After a huge amount of experimentation Linux Mint XCFE was my final distro. Light enough to keep performance high and startup times low but feature-full enough that I can back out of ES and use it for other things should the mood take me.

My RPi3 kinda got abandoned in the end due to hitting SD card limits or poor performance in PSX and 64 games so with this x86 install giving me that extra oomph, I'm fully invested again!

OK, I see the coolcv_x86_64 and coolcv_i686 binaries in the latest "all" bundle.
Not sure how I missed this earlier.
In any case, coolcv isn't enabled on retropie x86, so I can't install it from the retropie_setup as it doesn't show up in any of the package lists.

Might be worth adding now? Perhaps try to determine which build would be required (i686,x86_64) at module install time?
Or perhaps just go with i686 for compatibility? (I hardly think it's going to stress the computer's memory :) )