Emulate specific hardware in a VM to save old equipment?

Operating Systems & Open Source
1

Hi,

at work we have a 20 years old, irreplacable, 100 000$ photography equipment wich was sold with an HP workstation running Windows 2000 to control it.

The company who made it don’t exist anymore, the software is proprietary, nothing exist that can replace it.

Some years ago the HP workstation died and we found out that the software refuse to run if the hardware is not the same as the original HP workstation, like it won’t run if it’s not a Toshiba hard drive, if the cpu is not the same, and maybe more but we couldn’t test so we had to track down the exact same model of HP workstation to replace it.

Since we can’t find another one now and it is showing signs of old age, i’m wondering if it could be possible to run a virtual machine and simulate some specific hardware ?

I’m a little familiar with Proxmox, but i’m open to any other solution…

Is that even possible ? If so, can someone point me in the right direction ?

Thanks !

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2

It is possible to customize BIOS/EFI strings and the like to try and pretend you aren’t running virtualized:

No idea if that is enough customization to make your software work.

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3

Given enough time and money, probably.
Question is at which point the effort to keep 20 year old hardware working outpaces the cost of replacing that hardware.

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4

I have a purely theoretical ethical question, not saying you should do it. Just curious what people think.

Given the situation:

Would you hire a hacker to break the software instead and ONLY USE IT to keep that one piece of equipment working using a new computer?

  • Yes
  • No

0 voters

5

Missing from your poll is: Reverse-engineering the protocols and writing software that can support your equipment. Maybe you can even find others supporting the same equipment, and do an open source project together. Long-term, that’s the best solution.

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6

There shouldnt be a valid entity to sue you or the project. Unless someone actually bought the rights to the company. If you can verify that no one owns the rights it should be safe to proceed with reverse engineering.

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7

I don’t know the size or scope of this application, but 100k honestly isn’t even that much to spend on a project like this. I would not expect this to be an easily portable application, so there may be additional hoops to jump through even if these lame restrictions could be bypassed.

If it were me I’d try the VM first, and see if you can get the app up and running intact. If not, then yeah look around and see if anyone has had similar problems.

2 Likes
8

What exact HP model, serial number/model, what configuration does it have?

You can also try using QEMU…

https://www.qemu.org/docs/master/system/index.html

https://qemu-project.gitlab.io/qemu/system/device-emulation.html
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9

I believe that is precisely how you run MacOS on PC hypervisors.

How much control you have there, depends on your hypervisor, KVM has plenty of ways there.

I remember having to do configuration tricks there to make Nvidia consumer GPUs work with PCIe pass-through, before Nvidia relented and abolished their driver checks.