Best VM for Delphi development with parallel port

Question

I see that a number of people are doing S/W development (not just Delphi) using a virtual machine to host the IDE and all required files. I've used Microsoft Virtual PC to debug issues with my Applications on various OS's but with little access 'outside' the VM. My applications use USB, serial and - crucially - direct I/O writes to hardware (via an I/O permission driver). I'd like to have the VM see all of this (only one VM would run at a time of course). Is this possible? Is there a preference of Virtual PC versus VMWare? Thanks in advance. Brian

Answer 1

I haven't tried it with a parallel port, but VMWare Workstation 6 (running Windows XP Pro on top of a real XP Pro host) allows me to talk to the serial ports just fine. I have a 2-port serial comms card in the machine and VMWare is configured to give control of the ports to the guest machine. (This is for a cheque-scanning device).

I haven't gotten into this with the USB versions of the cheque-scanner yet, but my experiences with VMWare Workstation on the PC (and VMWare Fusion on the Mac) would suggest that this will also work - it's pretty good at giving you access to the underlying devices if you take the trouble to configure the VM software at first.

I'll be interested to see what other responses you get. :-)

Answer 2

Hi Brian,
I am currently working with sun xVM VirtualBox, in which you can install most any OS.
USB Support:(full/filtered) USB / USB2 (EHCI) controller
Serial Ports: 2* Com1-4 / User Defined (Set own IRQ and I/O Port.
Mode: Host Pipe/Device/Disconnected. Can Create Pipe ans specify the path.
CD/DVD: with Pass Through (No Audio Writing yet)
You can also enaple 3D acceleration.

It also support IO APIC/ACPI / VT-x/AMD-V with nested Paging / PAE/NX
(Had to look up some of those abbreviations to know what they mean.)

Edit:
I have not used any of the above functionality for developmental purposes.

Answer 3

I have experience with Virtual PC and VMWare Workstation. While Virtual PC does a good job of managing the OS it doesn't expose USB or parallel ports while VMWare Workstation does. The good news is that VMWare has a converter you can use to convert a Virtual PC VM into something that they can use, and you can use the free VMWare Player to test with before making the switch. Sadly the migration is a one way path, so make a backup of your Virtual PC VM's before you go thru the conversion.

Answer 4

I use VMWare Workstation 6 to debug our EPOS software, which uses thermal receipt printers connected to a serial PCI card in my machine. I can redirect the serial port to a file and see if I am sending the correct commands.

You should be able to access the host computers parallel port in the same way, from the VM.

Page 313 of the VMWare Workstation 6 manual explains how to add a parallel port to a VM.