Is till use an old Telephone exchange system Auerswald ETS2204. Unfortunately the administration software runs on Windows7 but no longer on Windows10. So I had to find an alternate way to run the software. All my systems run Linux so I tried to start the software with wine and the software started successfully. Unfortunately I wasn't able to use COM1 and had to find out how to access COM1 in wine. Because my Laptops don't have a RS232 plug any more I bought a cable with an USB to RS232 converter. Following steps helped me to get COM1 to work in wine:
 

Follwing instructions assume Linux uses /dev/ttyUSB0 to connect to a RS232 interface to use COM1 in wine.

1) Edit wine registry:

Use wine regeditto invoke the editor and add following definitions in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Wine\Ports

COM1 -> /dev/ttyUSB0

COM5 -> empty, no entry

2) Activate the change::

wineserver -k

Now start the windows software with wine ets2204w.exe and configure to use COM1. That's it.

References

Superuser.com: Converting the /dev/ttyUSB to com port to use it with Wine in Linux