Dolphin Games with spaces in the filename fail to launch

[pgn2100]

General Checklist

[x] I have searched for similar existing issues.

[x] I can reproduce this issue consistently.

[x] I am using the latest version of the software.

Operating System

[ ] Windows

[ ] macOS

[x] Linux

What is the issue?
can't launch dolphin games from freegosy, when i check the erorr its gives me Command: flatpak run org.DolphinEmu.dolphin-emu /mnt/qvo/emudeck/Emulation/roms/ngc/Fire Emblem - Path of Radiance (USA).iso

it maybe because the rom name contains spaces and needs "".

[abduznik]

Thanks for the detailed report. I dug into the launch code and tried to reproduce this.

Good news/bad news: the actual command construction looks safe. native_linux_strategy.dart's flatpak launch path builds the process call like this:

final parts = exePath.split(' '); // "flatpak run org.DolphinEmu.dolphin-emu"
await io.Process.start(parts.first, [...parts.sublist(1), ...args, romPath], mode: io.ProcessStartMode.detached);

romPath is passed as its own argv element to Process.start, which execs directly without going through a shell — so spaces and parentheses in the filename shouldn't be split or need quoting. I verified this with a minimal Dart script that mirrors this exact code path and confirmed the ROM path arrives at the child process completely intact, spaces/parens and all.

The Command: flatpak run org.DolphinEmu.dolphin-emu /mnt/.../Fire Emblem...iso text in your error is just Dart's ProcessException.toString() — it joins argv with spaces for display purposes only, so it looks like an unquoted shell command even though it isn't one internally.

Since I can't run flatpak on macOS to test further, could you help narrow it down on your Linux machine?

1. Run this manually in a terminal and paste the exact output:

   flatpak run org.DolphinEmu.dolphin-emu "/mnt/qvo/emudeck/Emulation/roms/ngc/Fire Emblem - Path of Radiance (USA).iso"
   

2. Check Dolphin's flatpak sandbox filesystem permissions — /mnt paths are a common flatpak gotcha:

   flatpak info --show-permissions org.DolphinEmu.dolphin-emu
   

3. As a quick sanity check, does a Dolphin ROM without spaces in the filename launch fine from the same /mnt/qvo/... directory?

That'll tell us whether this is a sandbox filesystem-access issue rather than an argument-quoting one.

[pgn2100]

tried to run it and found out that the file path needs to be between '' so it would look like this
'/mnt/qvo/emudeck/Emulation/roms/ngc/BloodRayne(USA).iso'
even without spaces it won't run with out ''

[abduznik]

Dug into this further and it turned out not to be a filename/quoting issue at all — the ROM path was already being passed correctly. The real cause is Flatpak's sandbox: Dolphin's flatpak only has filesystem access to $HOME, /run/media, and /media by default, so a ROM stored somewhere like /mnt/... fails to launch regardless of its filename. Freegosy will now detect this and tell you the exact flatpak override --filesystem=... command to run, instead of a cryptic ProcessException. Would be glad if you can check the pre-release!
https://github.com/abduznik/Freegosy/releases/tag/v0.5.11

thank you!