Using special PCI cards in a virtual machine

See more:

VMware

PCI

Hello all,

Introduction
A customer has an old Pentium with windows 98 installed and a PC card installed that connects the PC against a special machine in their factory.

Today the computer has failed and started acting funny.

The customer has asked me to get an old computer and get it working again.

I don't have any source code of the programs running on that PC so it is not possible to reconfigure anything.

We can try finding an old computer, but we will give the customer a half baked solution: that computer could die at any moment and at any moment we will not be able to find a replacement.

Idea
It would be great to be able to virtualize the computer (then all the configurations and so would be automatically saved into a virtual machine that can be "backupped") and being able to configure the virtual machine to use that PCI card that we would need to plug into the new computer (given a PCi to USB) adaptor or a direct PCi port).

Question
The last time I read about it, it was not possible to use PCi cards into a virtualized environment.

Anyone here has any similar experience?

Which would be your recommendations?

Do I need to use something like VMWARE ESXi or any normal virtual machine can do it?

Greetings
That's all, thank you for reading and for posting suggestions.

Thank you in advance!

What I have tried:

I've only searched for information in the Internet... but I would like to get extra information about it.