I am playiong almost all DK hacks on retropie.
I am using lr-fbneo, because they support almost all DK hacks. They added a lot of them end of august. To enable the support I had to update the lr-fbneo emulator from source (possible from the retropie menu options.
Some hacks are not suported because they do not provide new functionality (my DK Freerun Edition, Sock Masters Springs trainer and DK Barrel Control Coloring as i remember correctly). I wanted them yo and had to change the lr-fbneo DK driver cpp and build the emulator from the changed sources.
Hope this helps?