Hi omiadhi,
your welcome, people answered all sorts of questions for me when I started...seems like the right thing to do to help someone else.
Sounds like your dead set on Windows 10 and therefore need an external controller. I don't recommend Chinese ones, any quick scan of the posts
in the forum will tell you most really really struggle to get them to work.
The cheapest and simplest are the UC100 and its look-a-like competitors the PMDX-411 and PoKeys 57CNCd25 are all good and the respective manufacturers
are very good about support but they only have 'one ports worth' of IO. They very conveniently have a db25 output plug which is pinned indentically to Machs
parallel port and plugs straight into any number of BoBs or drivers. The downside is that they have only one port, so 12 output pins and 5 input pins.
You don't need a very sophisticated machine and you will run out of input/output pins.
For this reason I recommend you consider the ESS by Warp9, the PMDX-426 or the PoKeys E57 or U57. The ESS has three ports, the PMDX has two and the
PoKeys boards have 55 IO pins, a bit more than three equivalent ports. They are more expensive but not hugely so and when you need the extra capacity
it'll be there. You may note that I didn't include the U300 and 400 devices by CNCDrive, its not that they're not good, they are, and plenty of ports too, but
they don't have a Mach4 plugin yet. ger21 has informed me that CNCDrive has Mach4 plugins but they're not on their website yet.
This hobby is expensive enuf without buying stuff that doesn't work as well as it should or you have to buy bigger a bit later on....
Craig