Stuck in mameui screen

[donmonii]

First time posting here. Can’t find this solution in the forum or online, so hoping this is an easy ask of the community.

Specs:
Pi400 (armv71) using provided power supply
Retropie version 4.7.1 running on Raspbian GNU/Linux 10
Built from pré made SD image
Usb mouse and ipac2 connected
Controller is an arcade 6 button 2 player homemade panel wired to the ipac2.

I am running emulationstation with retroarch 1.8.8

I have select + start set up in retroarch.cfg to be my escape/quit and in most cases it works. On the occasion in A libreto mame game, a rom or core config overrides and the hotkey combo doesn’t work. if I hit the escape key on the pi400, it enters the mameui screen (mame 0.159 - Sep 4, 2020) pops up (see image). The problem is I don’t know how to get out of this screen. If I launch a game, the hotkey is still not working, and selecting exit just initialized a new screen of this mameui which feels like I am stuck in an endless loop. Basically I think the mame config is taking over retroarch and retro pie configs at this stage and without being able to exit back to emulation station, the only remedy is to reboot the pi.

Any thoughts would be extremely helpful.

[mitu]

This looks like the Mame2016 core, you might have enabled one of core options that start the MAME OSD menu.