As EPLAN has moved away from physical dongle support (effective May 2023), users with older hardware keys may fear future incompatibility with newer Windows versions.

A dongle emulator (often called a "software license emulator" or "virtual dongle") is a piece of software that mimics the behavior of a physical USB hardware key. Instead of plugging a physical dongle into a USB port, the emulator intercepts API calls from the application (e.g., EPLAN P8) and returns the same responses the hardware dongle would.

The dongle emulator for Eplan P8 22 likely provides the following features:

: Emulating a dongle for software you don’t own is illegal (DMCA / copyright law). Reverse engineering for interoperability or security research may be allowed in some jurisdictions only if you own the original dongle and are making a personal backup/VM-friendly version.

If you actually meant (modern version) — that’s a different story. It uses CodeMeter (Wibu-Systems) with stronger protection, making emulation far more complex and requiring reverse engineering of encrypted license containers.