@FDChappie while trying wine was a great idea, it has limited support for accessing USB devices (e.g. a serial to USB adapter). I wrestled with it for a while but kept getting the error in the screenshot I attached. I'm going to try a winxp vm next and hopefully it has better luck accessing devices attached to the host than wine did.
View attachment 39509
When I got it all from Bill Hamilton, he states you have to stop and prevent it from updating the drivers for the USB.
Everytime I tried to run the program on windows 10 I had to delete the drivers and reinstall them and stop them from updating.