What is the most suitable virtual machine software for sharing hardware ports (COM, LPT etc) at register level?

Question

I'm using Delphi to develop real-time control software and over the last couple of years I have done some work running older Windows installations under Microsoft's VirtualPC and it works fine for 'pure software' development (i.e no or limited access to the outside world). Such tools seem able to work with network connections but I have to maintain software which performs I/O via the parallel port (via a device driver). We also use USB I/O. In the past I've liked Microsoft's virtual tools because it takes time to install a new operating system and then (in my case) install Delphi and a load of libraries and components to provide development support. In these circumstances I've not been too bothered by my lack of access to the low-level I/O ports.

I want to up my game and I'm happy to pay for a good virtualisation tool IF I can have access from it to the outside world, i.e I want to be able to configure it to allow access to my machine's parallel port and com ports in the same way as if it was running natively. This access has to be able to expose the parallel port in register terms, i.e to 'see' the port at address $03f8 for example and to support I/O operations of those registers (via the appropriate kernel access) as my Windows 7 64-bit installation is able to do.

I see that there are a number of virtualisation solution out there now but it's quite hard to acertain the capability of each at such a low level. Does anyone have any experience or knowledge in this area?

Answer 1

The VMware products would be suited best for this. You can add virtual serial and parallel ports and forward them to a physical port on the host, or even to a file or a named pipe.

You can also connect any USB device that is connected to the host machine.

This works with VMware Workstation, but might even work with the free VMware player too.