[cyberax]

> 5-10 years is not unreasonable expected support I think.

A couple of years ago, I helped a small business with an embroidery machine that runs Windows 98. Its physical computer died, and the owner could not find the spare parts. Fortunately, it used a parallel port to control the embroidery hardware, so it was easy to move to a VM with a USB parallel port adapter.

[pdw]

That was very lucky then. USB parallel ports adapters are only intended to work with printers. They fail with any hardware that does custom signalling over the parallel port.