Legacy Serial Compatibility

[LegacySerial]

Hi all,

I have a one of a kind machine/software setup that is currently running on an unmaintainable packard bell PC, I need to get running on modern hardware for BCP reasons.
I have a windows 10 PC with a PCIe serial card, have tried running VMware and 86box with win95 and serial passthrough with no luck.
Have triple checked serial settings, have proved passthrough is working from hyperterminal to putty, can both send and receive (this is cable from test PC to a separate laptop, Not virtual to host).

When the software is opened on the legacy PC and serial is connected the machine responds immediately and goes through a calibration phase, If the serial cable is not connected it displays "profiler not present"
When opened on modern PC the machine doesn't respond at all or display the "profiler not present alarm"

I'm completely at a loss and open to any suggestions, ideas (no matter how crazy)

Thanks in advance

 

[Solaris17]

Im going to guess this is heavy industry. I have seen your plight a thousand times and I will pour one out for you.

If possible, in the past I have solved this in a few ways, in almost all of them virtualization was the answer. Specifically for you, I see you tried some of the emulation and vmware stuff, but if possible, could you try proxmox? I find there hardware passthrough more direct than emulated. Additionally, if you can clone (you should anyway pro tip!!!!!) the control PC you can use any of the free P2V tools so you can import it into proxmox then pass the hardware to it.

A big glaring concern in this, is some things especially pcie.......are generally going to want IOMMU and SRV-IO. Which might require you spending money on a low end dell, supermicro, gigabyte, asrock rack, asus, server that has the options to enable in BIOS.

This method passes control of the physical hardware to the VM instead of handling an emulation layer.

Again, you should get a clone of the drive anyway just so you have the OS with the software. I know its tough in heavy industry to get the funds for the things you need, shit even placement can be a problem.

At the end of the day though I have seen people that still said no, and kept a shelf of old boards, PSUs, serial cards and HDDs they got off ebay to keep multi million $$ cnc, robotics, molding presses etc online.