Seeking urgent advice on Retropie images

[Fluffyudders]

I really hope this is the right place for this, as time is short!

In a few weeks time, it is my handicapped friend's 40th birthday. Playing retro games is one of the two things he spends all his time doing, and so between myself and his family we are clubbing together to buy him an arcade machine. I've found a supplier who can put it together at a decent price, with either a Raspberry Pi 3 or 4, and they directed me here to some site to select an image (I've been looking at the 128GB) that they will stick on a microSD for me. However, information on these packs seems a little thin on the ground, and there are some specific requirements that I need.

The main issue is this: As my friend's co-ordination isn't very good, he gets easily frustrated by games he can't beat (which is most of them). Up until now this problem has been easily handled by using cheats, so that the games are more accessible for him. For Mame/arcade games these are often already present, but for console emulation it usually involves manually entering Action Replay or Game Genie codes, which naturally he has to wait for me to become available to do for him. I am aware that some emulators have packs available that place codes into an accessible cheat menu, though I've had mixed success getting those to work (I'm no expert!). I was hoping that I might be able to find an image that has all of these cheats built-in, or at the very least an easily-accessible interface in which codes can be entered/saved. Realistically, without the cheats, he will be unable to play most of the games and the whole project will fail, so this is my biggest concern.

On a similar note, while cheat access is the biggest priority, I am also curious about the size of many of these images and just how many games they include for various systems. Many of the roms I've acquired for my friend are very small in size, so naturally I believed that a 128GB image would easily include all roms with space to spare, but from what I can tell this isn't necessarily the case. Is it because of newer games/systems taking up the bulk, or perhaps the interface itself? Either way, my friend is very unlikely to care about hundreds of Japanese language sports games and such, so I was wondering about images that perhaps focus on English-language releases? Again this is ultimately an accessibility issue, but after cheats, the next most important thing is stability, as selecting a game only for that game to not work correctly will surely result in upset. A friendlier more accessible interface would be preferred. Missing games would also be an issue, though my understanding is that any missing rom could be added fairly easily if that came up.

The reason I've said time is short and I need advice urgently is because his 40th birthday is on the 22nd October and the company involved obviously need a lot of that time to build the cabinet and ship it, meaning we ideally have to make the purchase within the next couple of days. While I'm hoping that there is a suitable image someone can suggest that is ideal for these requirements, life has taught me that's probably not the case, and so I urgently need feedback in order to get this sorted out in time. If this isn't the right place to be asking this, simply pointing me in the right direction would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you in advance for any/all help and advice I receive.

Rich

[mitu]

We don't support 3rd party images, especially the ones loaded with ROMs - as are the ones that you're trying to choose from. Use the image from retropie.org.uk/download and follow the installation instructions from the Docs.

If you're hard pressed on time, I recommend you get your brother friend a ready made console, like one of the mini consoles released by Sega/Sony/Nintendo, which come already installed and with the games included.