Help Needed / ARC-D (RetroArch Hotkeys)

Thanks so much in advance. I got my Anbernic ARC-D yesterday and I'm loving it overall, but I think something is off with the standard settings.

The Emulators section is fine and the everything on the Android side appears to be fine, but running RetroArch from the Linux is giving me issues. I've figured out how to Save Core Overrides after tweaking other settings, but I can't figure out what's going on with my RetroArch hotkeys.

Every time I open a game it's like the device thinks I'm holding down the F button and instead of simply playing the game correctly it auto-saves, or opens special volume controls, etc. For example when I play Contra on Gameboy, every time I press Up+A to fire above me the device thinks I'm trying to save via hotkey, but I'm nowhere close to pressing the F button to do that.

When I try to adjust those hotkey settings (I've reviewed a variety of posts sharing helpful tips) they never actually save, so the problem occurs every time I open up a system through RetroArch. I press Up+A or Up+B and hotkey menus pop up instead of normal gameplay.

I've been at this for hours trying to fix. Please help.