Oracle Virtual Box PCIe Printer Port Question

[joeqsmith]

Background
I have some equipment that uses the printer port.   I had found a PCIe card that works with DOS up to Windows and was able to get my old tools working with it.  We had a storm which damaged some of my equipment including this port.   I found the same board and have run some hardware tests on it and it's now working.

Problem
I would like to run the software under Oracle VirtualBox.  There is some support for printer ports but I wonder to what extent.  After reading the following: 

https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=24&t=54187
https://www.reddit.com/r/virtualbox/comments/eo7jzd/how_to_enable_parallel_port/

All the software will be doing direct I/O calls.   I am able to see the port under a virtual machine but sniffing the port, I am unable to create any activity.   Has anyone here been successful in getting the printer ports to work?