A very old version of Romer software called Suprastuff was designed to run in MS Dos. Our original installation had it on a Windows 98 laptop provided by Romer way back in the day. A recent task was to migrate it to a new laptop because it was on its last legs. This turned out to be quite a challenge because of the legacy software. It turns out that Windows XP and later virtualize MS DOS using NTVDM (more on that here). With this, the MS DOS applications cannot access the hardware (eg COM Ports) directly (whereas it could in old versions of MS Dos provided in Windows 2000, 98, and 95).
The end solution was to run a base install of Windows XP and virtualize an install of Windows 98 using Microsoft Virtual PC. Once sharing the hardware COM and LPT ports, the virtual Windows 98 install could run the Suprastuff software to allow the Romer arm to make 3D point clouds. Bonus: no more floppy disc file transfers.