If you are looking for deep technical documentation or architectural overviews—the closest equivalents to a white paper—the following resources are the most "interesting" for understanding its design: 1. Project Architecture & Licensing
EmuELEC expects ROMs in the roms/ folder on the (visible when you insert the SD into a PC after first boot).
Next to each release file, you'll see a .sha256 or .md5 file. Download it too.