Program installation within VM

[Dirk2904]

Dear all,

My retired father in law is using a plotter to cut lettering films. The plotter he uses is 16 years old and still working fine. But his computer (winXP) is getting too slow, so he really needs a new one.
The plotter is connected via LPT connection, by the way.

My idea is to buy a new Windows 10 pro Business PC incl. LPT PCIe card to connect the plotter. Then, I'd like to install Virtual Machine (WinXP) and install the driver and cutting software within Windows XP.

Will this work? Can I install programs within WinXP and the plotter will work?

Appreciate your support!
Thank you in advanced and best regards from Germany

[mpack]

It may work, but I suspect you will not be happy with it. Any plan which involves having a virtual machine control physical hardware is IMHO liable to end in disappointment.

Have you verified that the software will not run on Windows 10? Almost everything should, if it's a 32bit app that doesn't require specialist drivers (and anything that needs to talk LPT will just use the host OS). You don't even need to mess with compatibility modes. Since the plotter and software were presumably bought in 2002 (definitely XP era), I don't see why it would have a problem. I have lots of software much older than that which runs fine.

If for some reason it turns out to be a 16bit app then it's still no problem, but it means you must install a 32bit version of Win10, and enable the NTVDM feature (i.e. 16bit on 32bit layer). NTVDM is not available for 64bit Win10 which is why you must install a 32bit OS.

[Dirk2904]

It may work, but I suspect you will not be happy with it. Any plan which involves having a virtual machine control physical hardware is IMHO liable to end in disappointment.

The manufacturer confirmed that the the driver for the plotter is available up to Vista. They also suggested to install VM and run WinXP on the PC.

Have you verified that the software will not run on Windows 10? Almost everything should, if it's a 32bit app that doesn't require specialist drivers (and anything that needs to talk LPT will just use the host OS). You don't even need to mess with compatibility modes. Since the plotter and software were presumably bought in 2002 (definitely XP era), I don't see why it would have a problem. I have lots of software much older than that which runs fine.

My father in law has a license for the cutting software (Eurocut 5) which is running up to WinXP SP1. Latest software is called Eurocut 8 and runs on Win7 and higher. Unfortunately he hasn't got the license for Eurocut 8.
I thought about to install all software and drivers on my Win10 laptop and see how it goes. But I have to buy an adapter from usb to LPT connector of the plotter. The plotter manufacturer said that not every adapter might work. So I might have to buy different brands and just test it.

If for some reason it turns out to be a 16bit app then it's still no problem, but it means you must install a 32bit version of Win10, and enable the NTVDM feature (i.e. 16bit on 32bit layer). NTVDM is not available for 64bit Win10 which is why you must install a 32bit OS.

Thanks for the hint.

[mpack]

The manufacturer confirmed that the the driver for the plotter is available up to Vista.

I can't work out if that is likely to be true, or if you and they are just being loose with language. I'm not convinced that any developer would incur the complication of writing a proprietary Windows driver when the device is essential just a specialist printer with an LPT port. I'm not sure you would even write a printer type minidriver. I would have thought the program would just open the LPT port in raw mode and start talking, in which case the app would still run fine on a Win64 host.

However. Assuming the language is correct, and an actual OS driver must be installed, then again the solution would be to install a 32bit edition of Win10 as the host OS. While Win7 did introduce a new driver architecture, AFAIK Win10-32bit is still backwards compatible with the older Windows Driver Model supported by Vista and XP.

You can certainly use a VM to test all of these ideas.

I should perhaps mention one final option, though it would definitely be a desperate fallback: in fact it is likely that you could install XP on a modern PC. I ran an XP host myself until about 18 months ago, and the PC it was on was about 5 years old. The original installer won't recognize the hardware, so the trick is to transfer it on on there using a whole disk imaging app such as Macrium Reflect Free. You would have problems getting it to recognize SATA controllers (usually fixed by enabling an IDE emulation layer in the BIOS), and USB3 ports (you'd probably not be able to fix this, but the USB2 ports may be usable).