Looking under the hood, you will see in RetroArch it’s configuration file /home/cpi/.config/retroarch/retroarch.cfg where it will look for cores index - powered by h5ai v0.29.0 (https://larsjung.de/h5ai/)
and contents index - powered by h5ai v0.29.0 (https://larsjung.de/h5ai/)
This means directly from libretro, not from Clockwork PI. Moreover always the latest nightly build. That would explain that for some users it may work, depending of the download date. Might be that
a few weeks ago Rick Dangerous was correctly running on Gameshell, however the most recent one is not. That is why I had to build it on my own.
It would sure be nice to have a server with working and tested builds just for our Gameshells, however, that also means some work and need of infrastructure.
When in RetroArch and selecting Online Updater → Content Downloader
http://buildbot.libretro.com/assets/cores/.index-dirs is downloaded by the
Gameshell to get the list of content directories, among them Rick Dangerous.
When choosing Rick Dangerours, Gameshell will try to download it, however seems to look at the wrong place, first
https://buildbot.libretro.com/assets/cores/Rick Dangerous/http://buildbot.libretro.com/assets/cores/Rick Dangerous
which fails with HTTP 400, bad request, then
https://buildbot.libretro.com/assets/cores/Rick Dangerous/.index
also failing with HTTP 400, however the .index file works fine on my PC.
What it should look for, and what the .index file tells, is:
http://buildbot.libretro.com/assets/cores/Rick Dangerous/Rick Dangerous.zip
Which does contain xrick/data.zip. I don’t know why RetroArch fails to do this. May be a bug with blanks in URL’s? Something similar happens when I try to download Commander Keen. The URL that Gameshell uses to download the ZIP files is not entirely correct.
My current solution is to download all needed files on my PC then transfer them to the Gameshell, which works fine.