Apologies in advance if this is not in the right spot!

I've been very frustrated by the issues I've been facing with the images I'm trying to download. They are very large and after spending many hours downloading, the extraction was not straightforward (I'm on a Mac). Then I am trying Balena Etcher and never get a good validation. Now I'm seeing that the brand of SD card makes a difference.

In all, I'm spending days trying to d/l multiple images just to get one that works.

I guess I have two questions:

1) I'm most interested in the biggest and broadest image with retro standup arcade games (donkey kong, pac man, etc.) with a nice slick front -end. Are these images that different? Can anybody recommend one that is a sure-fire way to start?

2) Give the "Mac" route, I keep seeing that some extractors work and some don't. I keep getting corrupted files, etc. I've never experienced this with other types of data downloads (apps, movies, etc.) Can anybody else with a Mac provide their preferred tool selection for burning an image?