virtualbox.org

I have software that is used for data acquisition. This software is very finnicky, custom software that was originally written for Windows 98 and then updated for Windows XP. For some reason, the software will not run on different hardware. We recently had a motherboard failure, and had to replace the exact same motherboard to get this software to work. We have considered other software options like labview or matlab, but what about using our existing software in virtualbox? Can virtualbox emulate specific hardware, or is it just an OS emulator? Thanks.

No, it can't emulate specific hardware, unless the hardware you want just happens to be one of the chipsets it does emulate. Or unless you write your own emulate and build it into the code of course.

It would be a very unusual application that was that specific about hardware - usually only device drivers are that fussy, and the protection mechanisms in the OS prevent a user level app from getting too close to the hardware.

Will it work? There is no real way to know except try it and see.

Would it be possible to make a copy of the hard disk this software is running on, and then have virtual box 'boot it up'? Or does virtual box require a fresh install? Thanks for your prompt reply, unfortunately I'm not as knowledgable about this stuff as I'd like to be.

VirtualBox itself just simulates the hardware of a PC and doesn't require anything. Any method you might use to get an OS image onto a new physical PC can also be used to get it into a new virtual PC. Whether a cloned image works depends on how close the VM recipe comes to the physical PC recipe, and/or how tolerant the guest OS is of hardware changes.

Unfortunately, in my experience Win98 is not very tolerant of even minor hardware changes. It will inevitably prompt for the setup CD for this or that bits. If you possibly can install Win98SE from scratch then that is probably going to be much easier. In that case read the Win98 advice in the "Howto's and Tutorials" section before you start.

Oh, and I think I should mention that Win98 is not a supported guest OS. It should run, and IME it runs quite well if your host supports VT-x, but there are no promises.