[sdiy] FW: Some Audio DSP prototypes

[Gordonjcp]

On Wed, Apr 20, 2022 at 10:16:49AM +0000, Mike Bryant wrote:

> (And no this isn’t a good reason to move to Linux !  For a start half the tools we use aren’t even on that)

I'll tell you what would be though, and it has saved a lot of bother with the whole sorry mess of safety-of-life-critical Windows 2000, Windows XP and Windows 7 machines that I have had to cope with on modern systems.

Image the drive and run the whole sorry mess in qemu-kvm on some thumping great multi-core machine with a shitload of memory.  Spool up a VM when you need it and VNC in.  With a little care and attention you can just do USB passthrough for specific tools, or you can route things that expect to be talking to serial ports over the network.  This doesn't work for things that expect to be able to do mad l33 h4xX0r tricks like bit-banging DTR (yes, looking at you, Motorola) but it's surprising how well you can get things done.

Plus you can do stuff like filesystem overlays to keep a "clean" base image while you hack the hell out of something important, and then just blow it away and it's like you never touched a thing.

You could probably use Hyper-V if you want but that will be more work because you'll have to battle Microsoft to get it to support "unsupported" guest OSes.

-- 
Gordonjcp