The problem is that you’d need the quarter-million dollar electron microscope to test your reverse-engineered modern version, and if you get something wrong and you fry it…
That being said, I wonder why labs don’t just make a VM. Hardware passthru is definitely a thing, parallel port cards exist (as do serial port) and you can back up a VM to whatever modern storage you want. Maybe the problem is proprietary cards/connectors? PCI-X or older?
Do you really think that k8s, which is free (unless you buy a support contract) is less easy to manage at that scale than, what - a bunch of VMs with Docker installed? PHP and a NAS? Is that REALLY the cost sink you think it is?
Brother, what works in your homelab will NOT survive Netflix traffic levels.
And streamers are raising prices to get rich. Not because “k8s hard” lol
That’s still a cosmetic block and the script will eventually cut you off from the servers is what I think they more saying - as in, the servers will just refuse to send you the video.