@mkoff I think your problem is related to a bug already mentioned here on the forum:
https://forum.recalbox.com/topic/21810/quake-en-recalbox-7
Apparently there is not much information about this (there are probably very few users trying to run Quake on PORTS (I only had DOS, for example).
But of course it should work, apparently it is a bug, you can open an issue:
https://gitlab.com/recalbox/recalbox/-/issues