Legacy Serial Compatibility

[LegacySerial]

Hi all,

I have a one of a kind machine/software setup that is currently running on an unmaintainable packard bell PC, I need to get running on modern hardware for BCP reasons.
I have a windows 10 PC with a PCIe serial card, have tried running VMware and 86box with win95 and serial passthrough with no luck.
Have triple checked serial settings, have proved passthrough is working from hyperterminal to putty, can both send and receive (this is cable from test PC to a separate laptop, Not virtual to host).

When the software is opened on the legacy PC and serial is connected the machine responds immediately and goes through a calibration phase, If the serial cable is not connected it displays "profiler not present"
When opened on modern PC the machine doesn't respond at all or display the "profiler not present alarm"

I'm completely at a loss and open to any suggestions, ideas (no matter how crazy)

Thanks in advance

 

[Solaris17]

Im going to guess this is heavy industry. I have seen your plight a thousand times and I will pour one out for you.

If possible, in the past I have solved this in a few ways, in almost all of them virtualization was the answer. Specifically for you, I see you tried some of the emulation and vmware stuff, but if possible, could you try proxmox? I find there hardware passthrough more direct than emulated. Additionally, if you can clone (you should anyway pro tip!!!!!) the control PC you can use any of the free P2V tools so you can import it into proxmox then pass the hardware to it.

A big glaring concern in this, is some things especially pcie.......are generally going to want IOMMU and SRV-IO. Which might require you spending money on a low end dell, supermicro, gigabyte, asrock rack, asus, server that has the options to enable in BIOS.

This method passes control of the physical hardware to the VM instead of handling an emulation layer.

Again, you should get a clone of the drive anyway just so you have the OS with the software. I know its tough in heavy industry to get the funds for the things you need, shit even placement can be a problem.

At the end of the day though I have seen people that still said no, and kept a shelf of old boards, PSUs, serial cards and HDDs they got off ebay to keep multi million $$ cnc, robotics, molding presses etc online.

 

[Steevo]

Buy a prolific USB to serial adapter

Set buffers to 4096
Set to COM1 at the baud and bit settings you need.
Do you need CTS or RTS command lines?

 

[eidairaman1]

Buy a prolific USB to serial adapter

Set buffers to 4096
Set to COM1 at the baud and bit settings you need.
Do you need CTS or RTS command lines?

RS232, oh the days of The AT boards using Serial Mice

 

[Steevo]

RS232, oh the days of The AT boards using Serial Mice

Serial is how many devices were cracked back in the day. My DSL modem lasted a few months before someone read the whole system dump and realized the administrator password was stored in plain text. Then you could lock Qwest out of the modem and unlock port forwarding, disable NAT, run full DMZ, and adjust the settings for a well tuned connection.

 

[A Computer Guy]

Hi all,

I have a one of a kind machine/software setup that is currently running on an unmaintainable packard bell PC, I need to get running on modern hardware for BCP reasons.
I have a windows 10 PC with a PCIe serial card, have tried running VMware and 86box with win95 and serial passthrough with no luck.
Have triple checked serial settings, have proved passthrough is working from hyperterminal to putty, can both send and receive (this is cable from test PC to a separate laptop, Not virtual to host).

When the software is opened on the legacy PC and serial is connected the machine responds immediately and goes through a calibration phase, If the serial cable is not connected it displays "profiler not present"
When opened on modern PC the machine doesn't respond at all or display the "profiler not present alarm"

I'm completely at a loss and open to any suggestions, ideas (no matter how crazy)

Thanks in advance

To a certain extent VMWare (assuming VMWare Workstation?) allows you to connect and use USB devices to the Guest. Have you tried a USB to Serial adaptor and connect the USB adaptor to the Guest OS?

 

[Grog6]

I use winternals portmon to see who's talking, and the errors it throws. You need a non-64bit version of windows,iirc.
You dont need a device to ave a serial port now, look up "Bus Pirate", you can rewrite a bios that's soldered in.

 

[Frick]

+1 on trying a common USB adapter. I've forgotten what model we used at the previous job sadly, but it worked well. Do note that you might have to go through some models to find one to work, they can be finnicky.

You dont need a device to ave a serial port now, look up "Bus Pirate", you can rewrite a bios that's soldered in.

That looks like a device to me.

 

[eidairaman1]

Serial is how many devices were cracked back in the day. My DSL modem lasted a few months before someone read the whole system dump and realized the administrator password was stored in plain text. Then you could lock Qwest out of the modem and unlock port forwarding, disable NAT, run full DMZ, and adjust the settings for a well tuned connection.

My sub uses a Serial interface, I was able to get a serial xable to extend out further