Yes, probably a bad rom.Followed your advice, got RA 1.7.5, have all the cores. Tested it for a few minutes, so far great. SNES works, but NeoGeo still throws me off. I load the core, load the zip, but it gets me back to the RA menu saying no content. Anything I need to fix here? Tested the same rom from 2 different sites.
I've been using roms sites that has Mania and Free on their names.
Do you also happen to have unibios.zip in your Roms folder?
You've followed all the steps when creating the cache files?
I've personally had troubles with some NeoGeo roms, specifically Neo Mr Do, so it's very probable that these kind of problems might surge.
Although, I've been playing all Samurai Shodown with that version of Retroarch without any problems, again, all with their respective cache files.
Be sure to address the Cache directory on Retroarch.