[Hampshire] [OT] Tricky legacy DOS applications..

Hi, my dad's work computer recently died, and he's been meaning to run
his work stuff on a stable modern platform, but, he swears by the old
software he uses called framework3 (it's actually quite good!) Problem
is, framework3 is an old old DOS application.

The problems trying to run it:
- It hangs (causes the windows dos emulator thing to crash!) on
startup when running 'natively' under XP
- It works great under qemu, but I need to be able to print! qemu for
windows doesn't have parallel port 'passthrough', which is a
requirement (or some easy method of printing).
- Strange division errors trying to run on vmware when starting the fw
program...very weird!
- Couldn't get it to work on virtualbox...although I don't think
virtualbox offers parallel support any way.
- Not tried dosbox yet, but once again, the parallel support looks flakey.

I'm not really that clued up on running old apps on windows, so
there's perhaps there's something I could there.

When the program runs natively, it requires EMM386.EXE and all that
kind of stuff to be invoked first so that it can access high memory.

It's the printing bit that's the trick really. The ideal solution
would probably involve getting it to run natively on XP, but I'm not
sure that's possible. I'm no DOS/Win guru though!

Any pointers/handy programs/advice would be greatly appreciated and
would put a smile on an old man's face!

Cheers,
John.