Hoping someone can help me out

[Dddemers]

I am in need of keeping a DOS program functional, including the ability to print to 2 Dot matrix printers.

Currently, the program is running on a Windows XP machine and I am looking to upgrade the hardware and the OS. Trying to get this software to work with a DOS emulator (including a dos print emulator) seems like a real pain and before I go down that road I figure emulating the Windows XP machine may be the best option.

Would virtualbox be suitable for the following setup??

Windows 10 64bit host, running Windows XP (to run Dos). Connect the 2 dot matrix printers via LPT ports on the Windows 10 host and make them available to the Windows XP machine (and dos).

if Windows 10 is going to be a pain, I would be willing to use Windows 7, but will be EOL soon so Windows is preferred.

[BillG]

Anything to do with running DOS on a modern computer is going to be a pain. The hardware is simply too different from the hardware DOS was designed to run on.

The guest will not directly see any hardware of the host. The host has its own emulated hardware. Making the host's hardware visible in the guest only works if the software (in this case VirtualBox) has implemented hardware passthrough. LPT passthrough has a bit of history.
Do a search for lpt passthrough :virtualbox .

[mpack]

Virtual machines are designed to run with virtual (simulated) hardware. If you're thinking of using them to control physical hardware then you're pushing it into territory it simply isn't designed for.

There is a high level freeware DOS emulation around called DOSBOX, have you tried it? It's not actually a VM, it's a CPU simulator that runs a DOSlike environment that's good enough for many DOS programs. It has some support for LPT, but I can't promise your printers will work.

[mpack]

You say that the program currently runs on an XP machine. Have you considered running it on Windows 10? I believe it should work, provided you install Windows 10 32bit, then enable the optional NTVDM feature (the module that allows running 16 bit code on 32bit Windows, the module does not exist for 64bit Windows). It should then have the same ability to print as XP did, provided the LPT ports exist of course.

[Dddemers]

thanks for the reply all.

Yes I have considered going to 32-bit windows, however, the 4GB RAM limit really slows down everything else on the computer and to be honest I don't want to make this a simple process for the end user, I feel there should be a price to pay for staying with the DOS program as they could move away from it if they wanted to.

I am starting to consider just having 2 computers onsite with a KVM switch, forcing the users to change between the 2 computers. At first I didn't want to go this route since it is a pain for the user, but in the end, maintaining this DOS program is a pain I shouldn't have to endure lol. If it wasn't my father in law I wouldn't have entertained any other type of setup

[mpack]

Unless the PC is being used for 3D CAD or video editing, then limiting the amount of RAM to 4GB shouldn't have any performance impact at all that I'm aware of. If anything a 64bit OS will be slightly slower, on the same hardware, due to many RAM I/O transactions being 8 bytes wide instead of 4 (admittedly a simplistic analysis but essentially correct).

I would have thought that if the goal is to run a DOS application and the previous host was XP with what, 256MB RAM? Most of it unused? Then a replacement with 4096MB RAM is no hardship at all!