Alsys 5.3 on MS DOS 6.22 in VMWare?

[jfgallant@gmail.com]

I'm seeing some discussion about the old Alsys compiler and VMWare on this group, but not both at the same time, so I'll risk asking...

We have this older (... much... older...) product that we need to support. It is an embedded 80386 target. The application is in Ada 83, and was compiled with the Alsys compiler. 

Up to this point our development environment consists of a (couple of) PC running MS-DOS 6.22 with the Alsys 5.3.1 compiler. Connection to the target (for flashing and debugging) is via a serial (yes, that's RS-232) link.

We're attempting to migrate this environment to more modern host platform, but must continue with the old Alsys compiler because of dependencies on the bootloader and runtime environment in the target.

So the question is: has anyone been successful in running the Alsys 80386 cross-compiler in a VMWare machine? Specifically:

- Alsys v5.3.1 (I believe it dates back to 1993);
- host O/S is MS-DOS 6.22;
- cross compiling to an 80386 embedded platform in protected mode (i.e. 32-bit 
  environment)
- VMWare player 3.1.5 on WinXP;

The compiler works fine, and indeed the binaries that come out of it are valid and run on the platform. What doesn't work is the AdaPROBE debugger. 

The probe communicates with the target through a virtual COM port in the VM, which is mapped to a physical COM port on the host, which is in turn connected to the target via standard DB9 cable. Using a terminal program and protocol analyzer, I compared the probe/target handshake between the legacy host and target, and virtual host and target. Both streams are identical. However when running in the VM, AdaPROBE refuses to continue further with the debug session, and exits with the following error: "The kernel version on the target is not correct". To be clear, AdaPROBE running on the legacy host has no trouble at all interfacing with the target...

I've tried everything I could think of and am running out of ideas. Any help appreciated.

JF.