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Mach3 under Vista / Re: Will MACH3 ever support 64-bit systems? Officially? FYI, it's 2010

« on: April 08, 2011, 09:51:22 AM »

Well, virtualization is probably going to remain an option. Especially if Microsoft improves their Virtual PC software. I still have to see if I can get Mach3 running in VMWare Player. That'd provide a free option for 64 bit Windows 7 Pro users and hopefully Windows 8 Pro users going forward.

I think external controllers with Ethernet / wifi support might be the future even more than USB ones. Something like a Beagleboard or a future version of Arduino should easily have enough horsepower for 4-6 axis CNC. Networking support would be pretty great for controlling and monitoring from a laptop and would easily let people switching controller PCs with a software install, not even requiring drivers. I'd bet you could even run a CNC rig off of a modern smartphone now that they're pushing 1Ghz with dual core processors.

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Mach3 under Vista / Re: Will MACH3 ever support 64-bit systems? Officially? FYI, it's 2010

« on: April 07, 2011, 10:48:53 PM »

Allegedly, Windows 8 will be 64 bit only, and if it isn't it will definitely be the last 32 bit desktop OS. That's going to force the issue sooner or later.

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Mach3 under Vista / Re: Will MACH3 ever support 64-bit systems? Officially? FYI, it's 2010

« on: December 02, 2010, 07:04:12 AM »

I went out and checked, VirtualBox doesn't have parallel port support. http://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/990 The good news is, VMWare Player does. http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/w7itprovirt/thread/260401be-73cc-4fec-8d9a-bc98f7e8a602

You'll need the a copy of Windows 7 Business, Enterprise, or Ultimate to download XP Mode file from Microsoft, http://www.microsoft.com/windows/virtual-pc/download.aspx You'll have to run it once in Microsoft Virtual PC to generate the VMC configuration file VMWare Converter looks for. Here's the Converter http://www.vmware.com/products/converter/ and here's VMWare Player http://www.vmware.com/products/player/

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Mach3 under Vista / Re: Will MACH3 ever support 64-bit systems? Officially? FYI, it's 2010

« on: December 01, 2010, 01:44:48 PM »

Okay this is a totally off the wall Rube Goldberg solution, but with Windows 7 Ultimate or Enterprise Edition, you can actually boot from a VHD virtual machine file like the provided XP mode VHD. That would give the VM full hardware access and might let Mach3 run the parallel port driver.

I don't know if Chris.Botha ever tried using a different virtual machine package either, but if he found one that worked, you could probably convert the provided XP Mode VM into it. VMWare can definitely convert them, but I don't know about VirtualBox or some of the other free solutions.

And at this point, shouldn't this forum be named "Mach 3 under Vista and 7"?

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Mach3 under Vista / Re: Will MACH3 ever support 64-bit systems? Officially? FYI, it's 2010

« on: April 09, 2010, 12:48:24 PM »

Honestly, the real question is "What advantage does 64 bit get you"? 64 bit Windows really only improves a few things: You get support for more than 4Gb of RAM, and can use more than 2Gb of RAM in a process. You get address space layer randomization which can prevent or protect a lot of different security flaws in Windows. You get 64 bit extensions which make certain tasks like media encoding 10% faster in 64 bit applications. Realistically, none of that is super useful for a controller PC, unless you're also running some 64 bit CAD/CAM software on the controller PC for some quick design work.

You have a point that it is 2010 and it's high time the software at least worked on a 64 bit PC, but you have 3 or so years till the next version of Windows is released which might be 64 bit only. That's when it really becomes a critical issue.

left of centre here but since i can capture a printer port in both VMware, Sun Virtualbox et al would mach run hassle free in a 32 bit VM under a 64bit OS?  If you are desperate enough to HAVE to use the dedicated controller pc as a standard work pc too  (which i completely disagree with) then this may be a solution?

Would be interesting to see if that worked, but I wonder if there would be weird latency issues involved. The free XP mode in Windows 7 Pro would probably be the best solution since that's included with the OS and thus basically free. I see people in the other thread talking about it and I'd be curious to see if it would reliably work for everyone.