Yeah, you're right and I should've thought of it from the beginning; it finally occurred to me after I posted but I found out that my dual-boot laptop had other issues 
So to save time I'm just reburning the image while trying to diagnose the linux boot issues.
But thanks for the suggestion 
Hey guys... after scraping one game (Puyo Pop Fever/DC 
) my RPi3 kinda hang. I rebooted it through the web interface and now when it boots it always gets stuck after the video, when the EMULGA logo appears... any ideas?
something is working because I can connect through Samba or the web interface, but...
I restarted ES through the web interface instead of rebooting and I get this error on top of the screen: [500.651830] EXT4-fs error (device mmcblk0p3): ext4_lookup: 1584: inode #1572866: comm emulationstatio: deleted inode referenced: 1572867
This happened after I deleted the conf file (was hoping it was going to regenerate - silly?), but happens still after placing it back. So... I don't know what to do 
Any help that would save me from reburning the image would be greatly appreciated!