Issue transferring ROMs and menu resolution screwed up

Neff

Hi everyone!

Just to give you a heads up I'm new to Raspberry Pi and this is my first project with it. I bought a Pi 3 kit off Amazon so I could play my SNES and N64 games. So far I've had two issues...

I had a lot of trouble transferring ROMs. I did my SNES roms first with no problem. But when I tried to add my N64 roms I had a lot of trouble. What is interesting is I did exactly what I did the first time, which I believe is what most people do, and transferred the ROMs with a USB but it didn't work. I used these steps... (https://github.com/retropie/retropie-setup/wiki/Transferring-Roms)

At first I only had a Retrolink N64 controller connected. After doing lots of research and really not coming up with an answer I decided to see if I could find a fix myself. So I turned my Pi off, plugged my keyboard/mouse in, tried again, and to my surprise the ROMs transferred over really quick. Now thats great... and I can play my games... But I didn't get a Pi just kinda get something to work. I want to understand what I was doing wrong.

Does anyone know why plugging a keyboard and mouse in made the ROMs transfer over? Just a coincidence?

After playing a little Super Mario 64 I decided to see if I could make the screen resolution larger. I read that a lot of people turn off "overscan" and that gets rid of the horizontal black bars at the top and bottom of the screen. I also changed the resolution. Now my RetroPi menu is larger than the screen I'm using. I tried changing the settings back and forth and nothing seems to work. The only thing that changes each time is the resolution of the boot screen.

Now I'm sure I could just do a fresh install and get back to where I was originally, but again... I want to fix this. Can anyone point me in the right direction on how to control the resolutions at different points?

I know this was kinda long winded but I didn't want to make two posts. Thanks in advance!