Thanks, I’ll keep persevering. I have no idea why it won’t save from the f12 menu. I just get a message that vice can’t save. It’s frustrating. So even though the.vice file doesn’t have that ‘l’ in the permissions like the others, it’s still a symlink? Trying to tie all this information together…. it’s not easy :)
Thanks again for your assistance.

Edit: went to add the joymap file directly into the opt/retropie/configs/c64…. but it already exists… what is going on?? Aaagh.