after doing some testing I have finally deduced that the reason I can’t play any games on my current setup is that almost all of the cores I test seem to be in an unstable state after building from git. The only core I can even get to start is bsnes and it consistently crashes after a few minutes. If anyone has the core binaries from any stable release between 1.0 and 1.0.2 please send them my way so I can test and confirm this hypothesis and so I can play some games :]
I need x86_64 binaries for linux. Just the .so library files will do. Thanks to anyone who can help