STAR WARS™: TIE Fighter Special Edition (355250)

Compatibility Report

• Name of the game with compatibility issues: STAR WARS™: TIE Fighter Special Edition - Collector's CD Edition (3rd game in the collection)
• Steam AppID of the game: 355250

System Information

• GPU: N/A (irrelevant)
• Driver/LLVM version: N/A (irrelevant)
• Kernel version: N/A (irrelevant)
• Link to full system information report as Gist: https://gist.github.com/dreamer/cd43dfbd75db508bf3382e4e1604804a
• Proton version: 5.13-6 (irrelevant)

I confirm:

• that I haven't found an existing compatibility report for this game.
• that I have checked whether there are updates for my system available.

Not uploading PROTON_LOG, because it is not being generated - bug happens before Proton is being started.

Symptoms

Try to start Collector's CD edition (3rd one in the launcher menu) - either in Proton or Boxtron - the game won't start and following error will appear somewhere in the Steam client log:

unexpected EOF while looking for matching `"'

The other two versions of the game in this collection work fine:

• Remastered edition (first game) - seems to work fine in Proton (can't say for sure, I can't play it as I don't have a controller ATM)
• Classic edition (second game) - starts fine both in Proton and Boxtron

Explanation

This bug was originally reported to me as a possible bug in Boxtron. Turns out this is caused by game publisher - it's a typo in Steam command line: https://steamdb.info/app/355250/config/

The problematic part is in the end of command line: (…) -c exit" - a " is missing - it should be:-c exit, or -c "exit", or not exist at all (because it's pointless - exit is already in dosbox .conf file for this game, but I digress). Steam is pasting command line verbatim, into sh -c which causes the aforementioned error.

Because of this, the compatibility tool is not invoked at all - the fix probably needs to happen either in Steam client, before the line is passed on to the compatibility tool, or the source line adjusted in Steam depot configuration for this game, or passed to the game publisher… I'm not sure…

Workaround

Place the following line in the Launch Options:

%command% # "

(it will work with Proton and Boxtron)

No Proton file, test, or entry point is identified; begin by reproducing the Steam launch command and checking how its shell quoting reaches the compatibility tool. Confirm whether the fix belongs in Proton or in Steam or depot configuration; done means the Collector's CD Edition starts without the launch-option workaround.