I did something similar for an organisation that had a strange music licensing setup for pub jukebox machines. A significant portion of their business hinged on

I did something similar for an organisation that had a strange music licensing setup for pub jukebox machines. A significant portion of their business hinged on this one ancient DOS pc with custom hardware and a licensing dongle. Ultimately it comes down to whether you can get the inputs and outputs you need replicated/attached to the virtual machine and and exact copy of the machine itself into virtual form - the latter challenge can include having to do risky stuff like physically removing the source HDD to plug it into various interface converters and then taking an image from it using an intermediate machine that can read it. Depending on how your setup works you may run into issues with things like time precision within a VM - if high time accuracy is important in the work it’s doing you’ll need to put attention into ensuring VM time = real world time.