Yeah... you should have been trying to build them back in the 80's...
LOL... motherboards had to be pinned, hard drives had to be pinned.. cables were color coded differently.
You had to assign the ports for each card... oh joy.... then the software recognition settings.... yup... bundle of fun...
And the modem strings... recognition handshake settings.... man oh man...
My brother-in-law and I were getting so we called boca modems and us robotics so often that they were asking us what settings we had for the games that were coming out...LOL...
Those were the days....sigh....
But Plug n' Play is king now! Good stuff.... Nice work, hope your experimental system works... and you get enough knowledge to build your own HAL... for CAD work.