Thanks for the pointers and the reference to Peter Homann. He has some pretty stuff on his web page!
My machine is a very basic 6040 and, at the moment, I'm using a crappy (non parallel port) USB Bitsensor board for the'getting it up and running' work and trying to learn the Mach3 operation.
My tiny budget dictates slow progression so the next step is to fit TB6600 drivers to start prototyping some fairly intricate objects for a long term project for a colleague working with confocal microscopes and tissue culture physiology. Pretty fancy cancer research.
When I'm competent with the CNC software and happy with the progress of the design I will justified in upgrading the electronics completely. It would be nice to jump these intermediate steps but I need to be realistic and aware of financial limits. This research is, for the moment, unfunded. This is a freebie for now but funding should be available later this year or early next year.
We shall see...
Cheers again,
Scintilla.