Hi,
Will I be able to update the software, or should I upgrade to Mach4?
I am a Mach4
supporter fanatic compulsive....so beware my comments are biased.
As Zasto pointed out you should be able to update Mach3 despite the license not strictly speaking being your own.
Mach3 is still perfectly capable and maybe does some things that Mach4 doesn't, however there are things that Mach4
does which Mach3 cannot do, and many things it does are much more refined and sophisticated than Mach3.
When comes to making parts, at least on typical machines, there is little to pick and chose between Mach3 and Mach4.
They are both equally accurate, equally smooth, equally fast, in fact equal in most respects.
As you probably know all development of Mach3 ceased six years ago, so any bugs Mach3 has will stay that way and
no new features will be added. In more recent times Microsoft updates to Windows 7 and Windows 10 have threatened
to stop Mach3, fortunately a fix has been found for that. The point being is that Mach3 is now an old program and may
be increasingly affected by advances in Windows OS's.
Mach4 is by comparison right up to date with new features being added frequently.
The real advantage of Mach4 is it flexibility to be customized for different machines. This comes about because of
Mach4's modular structure, rich API and its Lua scripting language. Being able to customize is of great value to an OEM
but may have little appeal to you.
I have found, and have seen the same in other hobby users, that a great deal of satisfaction can be had in programming
Mach4 to behave in some specific way that you want. Having said that you don't actually have to do anything to it,
it works pretty much straight out of the box.
My suggestion is to stick with Mach3, if that's what you've got. In the meantime you can download Mach4 for free and 'have a play
with it'. Note that Mach4 all but requires you use an external motion controller like an ESS or UC300, so you would have
to consider the cost of the controller and BoB in addition to the Mach4 license fee if you wanted to to upgrade.
My personal sentiment with respect to Mach4 is 'go mad now and beat the rush!'.
Craig