There are several reasons for wanting to do it this way - avoiding the use of a macro (including stubborness).
But first, some background. I have been professionally involved in programming since about 1970. I have no problems writing either g-code by hand or writing macros. After all, BASIC??? But sometimes Mach3 puzzls me a bit
Now, a significant problem with Crystal Basic and its interaction with Mach3 is that you cannot normally call one macro from within another. There are exceptions of course: you CAN call M6 from within a user-written macro for instance. Whether this matters here I am not sure.
What is much harder to do is to write a macro which allows you to move the controlled point around via the cursor keys
while the macro is executing. You can do this with M6 of course, but a feature of M6End is that it restores the starting position when it executes. To be sure, I could rewrite M6End, but I want to keep that feature in it. I could use little message boxes to enter new values for the axes, but that is a terrrible substitute for an arrow key.
In fact, right now, I can't see how to do this with arrow keys from within a macro. If someone knows of a way, please educate me! This is what I really want to do.
Yes, one can do something close using G92, but that smashes the use of G52, which I want to retain. I will be using G52 too.
Another reason for wanting to be able to do this (write to the DRO directly) is simply that it is a problem I would like to solve, IF there is a solution. I begin to suspect not.
Can one read the actual DRO? So far I have not found out how to do that either. I can manipulate it by playing with Workspace offsets and tool offsets and G52 offsets, but read it? There is probably an answer deep in the Mach docs somewhere - which I have not found yet. How please!
Cheers
Roger