Emulator

The actual "dolphin" binary should be located under Dolphin.app/Contents/MacOS/ (this is how Apple likes applications to be laid out). Can you try running PATH="/Applications/Dolphin.app/Contents/MacOS/:$PATH" my_melee_ai_program?

Interesting, I didn't know Dolphin.app was itself a folder. If I cd into /Applications/dolphin/build/Binaries/Dolphin.app/Contents/MacOS, then "open dolphin" opens it along with another terminal window, but "dolphin" still returns "command not found".

Now, I assumed this problem was independent of the particular program I'm trying to run, since the Dolphin github readme says "dolphin" should just work as a standalone command.

That said, the program I am trying to run is called "Phillip", docs here: https://github.com/vladfi1/phillip

Running PATH="/Applications/Dolphin.app/Contents/MacOS/:$PATH" phillip returns "phillip: command not found", but I suppose that's to be expected, since I cloned Phillip into a different folder. I'm still unclear about how that program works, but asking the devs there, it sounded like my issue was more dolphin-specific.

Dolphin is not installed as a standalone command on macOS (almost all GUI programs aren't).

Running with PATH="/Applications/Dolphin.app/Contents/MacOS/:$PATH" should solve the problem of finding Dolphin; any problems with the phillip command itself you should take to the Phillip devs.

Huh. Perhaps I'm misinterpreting something here, but looking at the "Command Line Usage" section here: https://github.com/dolphin-emu/dolphin

I got the impression that "Dolphin" is supposed to be a standalone command unconditionally. If that's not the case for Mac, why doesn't it say so there?

Did you just type "dolphin" or "./dolphin", The "./" tells the command line to open an executable in the current directory. You'll need to do this from within /Contents/MacOS

Can confirm that from /Contents/MacOS, "./dolphin" works, but not "dolphin." With ligfx's point, I've solved my problem, my last reply was just asking why this condition was stated on the Dolphin page since this didn't seem obvious to me.