PPSSPP crashing when i launch any game that isn't a demo

[SwitchAxe]

hi, i'm sofia, and i'm a linux user. when i was under debian oldstable (with the downloaded ppsspp appimage executable from the site) i had no problems playing games. now i'm under arch, and when i try launching any .iso that isn't a demo (i only tried cave story, and it worked fine) the game runs for a brief half of a second, then the whole application (not only the game. but the entirety of ppsspp) freezes for some amount of time, and then everything crashes. i tried switching the backend from OpenGL to vulkan, and i also tried to turn off all the experimental options in the ppsspp menu, but to no avail. can somebody please help me? what info do you need?