New user help: How to select a command line tool as the app

Hi, new user here trying to set up some custom buttons on the touch bar.

I have an emulator for Atari 8bit, its a unix command line emulator compiled to run on mac, I launch the emulator from a shell script that is run from an Automator action when I double click on a file.

I'm trying to set up the Atari custom buttons (Start/Select/Option/Reset/Help) as buttons on the touch bar when the emulator runs (they are mapped to F keys) but I can't get them to appear only when I run the emulator.

Trying to add the emulator to the BTT ui by browsing the file system has the app greyed out (its kind is unix executable file) if I run the emulator and then add it using select from running apps I get the app added to the list but when I attach an action to it, it doesn't show up the next time the app runs.

What am I doing wrong?