| So, here's a thought experiment: Start a company who's mission is to provide batch processing of hardware tests for their clients. Test jobs are submitted online with a packaged version of the software and a test script written in some job control language. This company has a huge warehouse (to start with) of all sorts of hardware. Every port and connector (ethernet, USB, HDMI, PS/2, serial, etc.) is hooked up via a giant network to a central server. The central server can then run the batch test jobs. It will deploy the software, and can even simulate interactive execution by routing keyboard/mouse signals to the device and scanning the display output signal. Obviously, sometimes the hardware will have to be reconfigured, thus reducing turn-around time, but clients can pay extra to have hardware set aside that is set-up in their particular configuration. Eventually they could build up a library of emulators which have been empirically tested to match actual hardware behavior (rather than the spec). Hardware that has been emulated can be tossed to allow room for new hardware. Customers might even be able to run on demand tests in "the cloud" using just the emulators. --- Basically, I think it's too expensive to do in an ad-hoc basis. You really need a setup that can benefit from the economies of scale. |