Well, I wish I knew that before I bought my PC.
Of course, with the missleading information in the misslabeled "minumum requirements" section of the ArtSoft home page, how was I to know that "32 bit version" is actually a maximum unlike the other things listed like Ghz and RAM that are truly minimums.
If I only knew then what I knew now...........
The language says:
◦32-bit version of Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista, or Windows 7 Operating System
What did you really want it to say different? Seems pretty clear and unambigous.
RE Smoothstepper and similar boards, what's probably not clear to a lot of people is that Windows is systematically making it harder and harder to support the parallel. It's pretty well hacked into the architecture. Over time, it may get harder until someday it is impossible. I have 32-bit programs today that won't run in Win 7 32-bit, for example. So, however much we may like the low cost of parallel ports (and the reliability with Mach3), they're a dying breed. How long will it be? Who knows? Forever if you are prepared to buy old PC's and Windows XP off eBay. But, some people don't want to deal with that for whatever reasons. So there needs to be some better answer over time.
The specific problem with products like Smoothstepper is they seem to reach a point where interest wanes, they are less well supported, and people start to wonder about them. Sometimes they die because of it, ala GRex. Sometimes it is just annoying. Smoothstepper, from my perspective, it closer to annoying than dying, but despite having one, I am not sure I can recommend them wholeheartedly because of this uncertainty over their support. Someone needs to finish one so it has all the Mach3 features like backlash comp and then support it well. If it isn't a big enough seller to keep the developers happy, then I wish they'd build more products so they could afford to working on Mach-related products or merge with another company that can help. I've suggested Gecko in the past, but a company like CNC4PC would do fine as well.
In the end, what's on the little microcontroller is just not that complex as software. Someone will figure it out and we'll have it. Heck, there are now people putting whole g-code interpreters into the Arduinos.
Cheers,
BW
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