think I got everything figured out. part of the problem was the couple of games I was focused on getting running first had their own unique problems going on, if I just tried some others things would of got going faster. gabriel knight 2 in retroarch, for some reason, just needed a lot more cpu cycles set for it? I just played through the entire game in retroarch like a year ago and it was fine, but everything was suddenly a lot slower though when I tried dosbox stuff recently. at first I was just getting a black screen in gk2 but then it started doing this
I also got separate config files for dosbox-staging so I can run things outside of retroarch now too. except out of all the games conquest of the longbow has some kind of sound problem that way. also the sc55 soundfont that is supposed to be a better one cause is was made from people working with the sc55 rom or whatnot sounds messed up in retroarch but fine through staging. at least everything is using the built in dosbox stuff now, so I don’t need omnimidi or anything anymore.