You did nothing wrong, it's just a terrible and bugged UI...Ahhh yea it was xmb already. I changed to rgui and restarted and I can read things now, thanks.
Any ideas on what I did wrong or how to prevent that in the future? I'm launching from snes9x 2002 and it also seems like it didn't keep some of my settings before - I'd sometimes have to rebind fast forward and almost always have to rebind turbo enable.