I placed them in home/cpi/apps/emulators/bios and they’re not showing up in retroarch. When I add them to home/cpi/apps/emulators they show in retroarch cores manager
Not sure if I get your question correctly, but I guess this might be helpfull; How to add new emulators (Gameboy, SNES, etc.)
For specific BIOS files needed to boot games, just put them in the same directory as the ROM your are trying to load.
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Which core are you using? Mame, GBA and PSX usually are the culprits.
The standalone emulators have their own locations; usually in the same directory as the emulator itself.
For Retroarch, the bios locations is referred to as the System/BIOS. The default location it is set to is the same directory as the contents. It won’t use the directory you specified, unless you specifically tell it to.
Herein lies the problem. You may get confused as to where to put the bios files, given that Retroarch and standalone generally use vastly different locations for the same bios. Since bios files are generally tiny, it won’t hurt to just put the bios both in the directory you specified AND the rom directory, just to cover all grounds.
I personally have my Retroarch system/bios directory pointed to the same place as the rest of my bios, just to keep things tidy and in one place. It gets messy with Mame bios files especially!
So the answer in a nutshell: either in the same directory as your Roms or wherever you told Retroarch to put the bios files. 
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