Really cool experiment! The idea of AI 'playing' games as a form of entertainment is fascinating—kind of like Twitch streams but fully autonomous. Curious, what were the biggest hurdles with input control? Lag, accuracy, or something else?
I couldn't get https://docs.libretro.com/library/remote_retropad/ to work! its designed for game pads to control the emulator. I was hoping I could repurpose it to just send arbitrary key commands over a network interface, but nothing I tried worked. When I asked in the retroarch discord, they couldn't figure it out either lol.
I doubt this answers any of your questions but check out saltybet on twitch - people make fighters and the computer pits them against each other a la street fighter