Thank you! I will pass the hint regarding the Device Manager on to our automation people!
But as far as I recall, the software runs on DOS (for real!), and attempts to run it inside a VM have not been very successful, because the link between the software and the PCL is very timing-sensitive or something like that. FreeDOS did not work, either; I got to install MS-DOS 6.22 on a few machines two or three years ago for that reason. It was fun actually, but finding three floppy disks for the installation media was ... challenging. ;-)
You can easily make a bootable CD-ROM for MS-DOS by using the boot emulation...
> mkisofs -b dos622_1.img . > \temp\dos6.iso
something like this, will get you a bootable CD that'll emulate a floppy and get you onto that first disk... It's probably easier to do a dump/restore set of whatever it is you need to install, or just make a boot floppy to load up MSCDEX & friends so you can xcopy as another solution.....
Parallel ports aren't too hard to find, there is PCI cards you can find with parallel ports.. Now ISA slots on the other hand....
I actually tried something along those lines, but I could not get it to work properly. The installation started normally, but when it was time to enter the second disk, the installer somehow did not accept the second disk.... :-|
On the upside, installing MS-DOS 6.22 from floppies took less than 15 minutes, and the freshly installed system booted withing 15 seconds. ;-)
But as far as I recall, the software runs on DOS (for real!), and attempts to run it inside a VM have not been very successful, because the link between the software and the PCL is very timing-sensitive or something like that. FreeDOS did not work, either; I got to install MS-DOS 6.22 on a few machines two or three years ago for that reason. It was fun actually, but finding three floppy disks for the installation media was ... challenging. ;-)