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General Mach Discussion / Re: Can't deal with XP and old computers any more. Help!

« on: January 30, 2013, 04:53:29 PM »

Hood,
You are correct. I have successfully run on 64bit OS in simulator mode and not installing the driver. I do that when writing code or building screen sets. I have even experimented with VMware and Virtual Box and had no luck with trying to use the parallel port. I finally stopped trying to update everything and came to the conclusion that many people are tossing perfectly good XP desktops in their efforts to upgrade and with a little work, they run perfectly with Mach3. I have a never ending stream of old desktops that I can "convert" to controllers . I have found that even old laptops with a P3 and W2K are sufficient in some apps. I keep telling my youngsters that old isn't necessarily trash...just depends on what the job is.

Cheeta

2

General Mach Discussion / Re: Can't deal with XP and old computers any more. Help!

« on: January 30, 2013, 02:48:50 PM »

I have been reading the threads and plain and simple Mach3 will NOT run in 64bit OS. The driver was written to use either APIC timer or take over interrupts in the uP in which case the architecture differs greatly in a 64 bit system. I heard someone mention the bricks or embedded systems which we use on a regular basis. I buy a nice little micro ITX MOBO(D5255MW Atom) and integrate it into the controller. The drivers, BOB and PC all live in a suitcase sized box and Mach 3 runs on a 32 bit version of W7. The Atom MOBO is less than $100 and I use a small 64G SSD with it. Boots in less than 30 sec and is entirely dedicated to Mach3 and SheetCAM in case people want to edit tool paths. I had a friend put together an install package for W7 the disables useless bloat services in the install. It is increasingly difficult to find nice boards w/ parallel ports but this one seems to be fast, cheap and reliable.