Cyber essential ring fencing basics.
The last thing I am is a hyper specialist. What I am is a damn good all rounder in the IT space.
I've posted a few times before about ring fencing specialist windows (7/NT/etc) installs to talk to ridiculously expensive hardware that does a specialist job, for which the vendor either no longer exists, or has no interest in updating the software for that set of hardware. (CAT and Xray kit mostly, but also a pair of 60 ton sheet steel presses with awesome capabilities, for which the *next* generation with updated software, running on newer windows has *cough* a) monthly baseline fees and b) for each of the awesome capabilities, monthly additional fees).
I'll note someone suggested Wine, above, and for *some* hardware connections its just fine, audio tends to be okay, printer port type connections are fine, but serial and USB connections tend (with this type of hardware) to be proprietary and Wine *really* doesn't like stuff like that. I *have* gotten parallel port connections with proprietary protocols working with Wine, but that was back when I was contributing. I don't know how far it got taken.
I'm a *very* firm believer in stuffing these instances into VM's and using the host firewalling to manage the connections directly for the guest. In my experience, it has worked the best, as VLAN management in windows 7 didn't exist. Yes, that can be done at the switch, but there are morons *who swap cables around* -- I'd hope there was mac address control on those ports as well, but I *really* haven't seen *that* much in the instances where I've done this, it seems to be an afterthought brought on by my ranting at the local tech. Hardware passthrough in KVM tends to work with somewhat more reliability than with Wine in my *personal* experience.
The *host* system can be backed up using standard processes, so long as we snapshot the VM beforehand, and get all the image files. With appropriate documentation, a system that was in use in this way, recently suffered complete meltdown (there was a serious fire, took out much of the plastic, wood, and non-hardened steel in the zone) where, when the rebuild completed on the press, and the software was restored from backup on new hardware, things picked up from where they left off. Documentation is *absolutely* required in these cases, careful, complete, and concise.