Here is what my extremely unconventional way to get it to work was. You see, apparently, the MAME emulator itself is the issue as it will only assign a maximum of 16 inputs per joystick. There is a guy out there with another project called retrocade that recompiled the mame4pi somehow to get it to work. I say somehow because I couldn’t for the life of me figure it out. Since I personally like RetroPie better, I did the following.

1 Get yourself 2 SD Cards
2 put image of RetroPie on 1
3 put image of Raspicade on another
4 boot pi with raspicade image
5 Now, you can configure raspicade to work, but that isn’t our goal. So exit the front end to a console prompt and then terminal into raspicade from your pc and copy the entire mame4all-pi directory
6 Now boot the Pi with RetroPie
7 Again quit emulation station to a console prompt
8 Go to your pc and replace raspicades mame4all-pi with the one you copied before the location is /opt/retropie/emulators/mame4all-pi/

9 Now you need to edit the directory section of /opt/retropie/emulators/mame4all-pi/mame.cfg to look like this. Make sure you have permission to save.

[directory]
inp=inp
nvram=nvram
hi=hi
cfg=cfg
snap=snap
memcard=memcard
sta=sta
artwork=artwork
cheat=.
rompath=/home/pi/RetroPie/roms/mame
samplepath=/home/pi/RetroPie/roms/mame/samples

Now go into MAME itself and map the buttons. You don’t mamp the buttons for MAME with esconfig on either system.

good luck!

By the way Note that your sound samples and gamelist.xml will now need to go in the same folder as your roms, but you can change that too.