virtualbox.org

I wonder if anyone can help me with an issue I'm interested in.

Basically we have a lot of old scientific equipment which often times will be running on an ancient computer. I've succesfully converted instances of Windows 95 with all their software and settings intact to a virtual box image running on a windows xp host machine. this has worked well as the scientific device the Windows 95 software controls works via the com ports which I have enabled. In this scenario, it's a wonderful solution to use VirtualBox.

The issue I'm having though is that I'd like to get rid of some ancient machines which have hardware capture cards. There is no standard necessarily for what this card may be but an example would be a card that connects the pc to a device like a microscope. What I need is to be able to move this card to a more modern pc, convert the old pc to a VirtualBox image and be able to access the card from the guest OS. Is this at all possible? I've read a little about the intel VT technology but I really don't know much about it. If I could access these cards I could get rid of a ton of old machines!

Thanks a lot for any help

Anything too specific like pci cards can't be accessed by the Guest, there are solutions like software routing drivers that route access to specific devices via tcpip, but they are costly. Personally I would inventory what needs to be accessed and by what means including communication details and then go to one of those programming offer websites where programmers can bid for the job of making you such drivers, all in all maybe a 2k freelance job.