Automation currently supports Windows 10/11 only. It requires uv, QEMU with WHPX support, and ffmpeg.exe on PATH. The Python implementation uses portable APIs where possible, but other hosts are not supported yet.

QEMU and FreeDOS automation

Start the Python daemon and QEMU:

uv run ferro-vm start
uv run ferro-vm status

TCPAGENT.EXE connects only to 127.0.0.1:5558. Local commands use the Windows named pipe \\.\pipe\ferrolang-vm; there is no controller or observer TCP port. Monitor the append-only structured log in another terminal:

uv run ferro-vm logs

Commands:

uv run ferro-vm reset       # clean QEMU quit and restart
uv run ferro-vm wait-ready --timeout 45
uv run ferro-vm ping
uv run ferro-vm exec 'dir C:\FEC'
uv run ferro-vm put fec/src/check.c 'C:\FEC\SRC\CHECK.C'
uv run ferro-vm get 'C:\FEC\TEST.OK' .qemu/TEST.OK
uv run ferro-vm screenshot
uv run ferro-vm ocr
uv run ferro-vm stop

reset cleanly quits and restarts QEMU, waits for FreeDOS to boot, submits the default boot-menu Enter, and requires TCPAGENT PING/PONG. QEMU system_reset is intentionally unsupported because repeated soft resets leave the FreeDOS NE2000 packet driver stuck during initialization. logs starts lnav when installed and otherwise falls back to PowerShell Get-Content -Wait. The daemon logs command metadata, DOS output, exit status, transfers, and agent lifecycle events as UTF-8 lines. It deliberately never logs raw binary payloads or protocol hex.

Standalone OCR

tools/qemu_ocr.py remains available for OCRing an existing image:

uv run python tools/qemu_ocr.py --image .qemu/qemu-screen.png