No chance unless you wish to write a kernel mode driver that does that sort of stuff and talk to that from Perl. Once you've written the driver the talking to it is easy.

Writing a driver is the final destination with this. We've got a machine that will only run under win311 and its a real pain. I hoped to test out the viability of doing this with familiar tools ie perl.

Bottom line: you can't write drivers in Perl. For various reasons drivers must be written in C (not C++; C) for Windows. Even if you know nothing at all about C, it would be quicker to learn C to write your driver than to attempt to use Perl!

For early versions of Windows you could use assembly language :), but still not Perl.

---

DWIM is Perl's answer to Gödel

Unless you have some proprietary legacy peripheral hardware that you have to interface to, it would be cheaper and faster to buy a newish machine and run a recent OS on it, than for you to poke around trying to write a driver. (When things start to go horribly wrong like this for me, I make sure I log every hour spent developing the solution, so at the end I can say "I told you so.")

But then, you knew that, right? So this must be something that can't run on anything else without even more work than you're already talking about.

-QM
--
Quantum Mechanics: The dreams stuff is made of