Tonight been mucking around reminding myself how to use Qemu. I don't use the likes of Aqemu; I prefer just using commandline (and taking appropriate notes in my cherrytree notebook).
Actually, I was also doing a Clarity type trick booting Ventoy physical usb stick via Qemu too; not really so much point to that for me though since can just instead boot the isos it contains directly.
My Ventoy stick does have a special third partition that I labelled "Persistence" as I documented elsewhere
viewtopic.php?p=101793#p101793
and so (with nothing to do with Ventoy) that proves useful to me in direct Qemu boot of the likes of KLA-XFCEpodman where I use boot -d to boot the KLA iso image but also attach the physical usb stick (as a -device format=raw) that has that "Persistence" partition, which immediately allows me to use the Qemu boot menu choice for RAM2 save on demand mode to Persistence partition. I'm also playing with Ctrl-Alt-2 to enter qemu monitor for experiments with usb pass-through techniques in already running Qemu vm.
Using the physical usb stick along with the iso image is pretty handy. Qemu is really nice to the extent that Ventoy is a bit irrelevant for me really. Still, nice to have that Ventoy usb stick that also has that Persistence partition for general RAM2 save on demand usage in Qemu (without using Ventoy itself - though using Ventoy as boot usb from Qemu also working fine though for that we do need the exFAT support and appropriate Ventoy-related grub.cfg and so on in iso/boot/grub).