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Does a Virtual Machine supporting writing through a serial port?

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krebizfan

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This is a non-vintage question but relates to vintage software.

I know VMWare (amongst others) claims to allow the guest software to write through a serial port. Does anyone have experience doing that with older software? I imaged some roughly 25 year old MS-DOS software before discovering it was designed to control hardware through the serial port. If MS-DOS inside of a virtual machine would have problems, I will encourage them to track down an older machine instead of trying for a virtualized replacement. All advice welcomed.
 
I believe Microsoft VirtualPC 2007 supports mapping to a physical serial port, I seem to remember playing with some checked builds of Windows and using a serial port to read the debug info.
 
I haven't thoroughly used or tested this. Virtual PC used to be better for sharing physical resources but I haven't played with it much post Microsoft purchase. I would think it does though. I can say that I know VMWare Server 1.x IS able to share a USB device to a VM (single device being assigned to a single VM though) while ESX last time I checked doesn't. One of those ironies if you pay thousands of dollars for VMWare vs using the free one.
 
VMWare Server 1.0\1.1 was free last time I checked as they are out dated. I have had problems getting it running on Windows 7 though, I don't like the web interface of the newer versions.
 
There are some unofficial DOSBox CVS builds that add direct serial port access under windows. I haven't tested it, but they should work. No guarantees though as old software can do some strange stuff with direct port access that doesn't work on emulators.
 
VMWare Server 1.x and 2.x are both free, but yes I highly dislike the 2.x web interface they went to instead of the VMWare Console that 1.x used. I think they're still supported/up to date (2.x is at least) but yes it's based on the defunct VMX version (used to be a pay version too). Still, that and Microsoft VMWare is also free (the only reason VMWare did that as well). I was going to play with QEMU but either I wasn't smart enough to find a legit precompiled copy or they didn't have one hosted locally. I ended up with the source code and went off on a tangent to go ahead and compile it which of course isn't going smoothly either.
 
I'm in to Virtual machine stuff pretty well.

I have successfully used the host machines serial port under the following programs
Microsoft Virtual PC 2004
Microsoft Virtual PC 2007
Microsoft Virtual PC
ESXi 4.1
ESXi 5.0
VMware Workstation 5
 
I run VMware Server 1.0.2 (it's free and has a nice console) and it does allow you to access the physical serial port of the host from a guest virtual machine.
 
We have several Linux machines at work that are attached to CNC controllers via serial. I forget whether I kept DOSEmu or DOSBox, but as I remember both worked fine using either a real connection at 9600 or 1200b, and a USB/serial dongle at 9600b.
 
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