Sooo M11 and M10 will still not work with the SS. I'm looking to turn on and off different outputs without any delays..

as win xp 32 bit will be gone very soon as in next 12 month

It was meant to be gone years ago. We were all meant to migrate immediately to Vista, then W7, and now W8. Kowtowing vigorously to the alter and handing over our wallets.

Reality is however that a LOT of major commercial users have told their hardware suppliers that future hardware purchases will be conditional on them coming with WXP SP3. Not W7 in WXP mode, but actual real WXP. They simply do not want to go through all the hassles of retraining and re-solving HW and SW problems with a new OS. They have been burnt once too often already, they have heard of all the hassles with Vista and W7, and they just don't want to know!

And those customers have the whip hand now because current HW/SW combos are quite powerful enough to last for another 5 years or more, and if they stop buying for a year or two the HW vendors are going to feel incredible pain.

I imagine (HOPE) once Mach V4 comes out it will be much more modular and able to be recompiled for other platforms. Who knows - maybe it could be recompiled to run on ... Linux! With REAL real-time support (plus Citrix or ...)! (drool!)

Cheers

these problems need fix fast as win xp 32 bit will be gone very soon as in next 12 month a stable 64 bit version needs to be done now

It's more likely that parallel port support will go away then be ported to a 64bit OS. Plenty of people are using Mach3 right now on Windows 7 x64 with the Smoothstepper and KFlop, and probably other devices as well. It appears that the future is external hardware, and if it is, then it's already here.

It's more likely that parallel port support will go away then be ported to a 64bit OS. Plenty of people are using Mach3 right now on Windows 7 x64 with the Smoothstepper and KFlop, and probably other devices as well. It appears that the future is external hardware, and if it is, then it's already here.

Genuine full-blown parallel port support went away quite some time ago in fact.  :-) :-)

Anyhow, given the realities of the NON-realtime nature of Windows-X, external hardware support is now a de-facto requirement for anything serious. Even hobby-serious. But that is OK imho. The PC does the file handling and grunt calculation, which it is very good at. The external HW does the real-time data streaming.

To be honest, when I first got into CNC I did not realise just how time-critical the direct drive of a CNC is. I should have, given my decades of work in real-time systems, but I didn't. Those external boxes such as the ESS are pivotal to good performance. Mach V4 could lose the PP without a problem (as long as they coordinate with Warp9 etc before the release.)
</soapbox>

Cheers

The PP driver will be in the form of a plugin in rev4, whether that means it will work on a 64bit OS or not I dont know.

Hood

The PP driver will be in the form of a plugin in rev4, whether that means it will work on a 64bit OS or not I dont know.

Fair enough - good approach.

Does anyone know whether there are 64-bit-compatible PP hardware units out there? I mean PP units which can work with Mach. Given that most existing adapters for current 32-bit systems can't drive Mach3, one wonders whether it is even worth while writing a PP driver.

Cheers

The Mach3 driver doesn't work on a 64bit OS. Without that driver, no parallel ports will work with Mach3.

  I hope to run experiments within a couple months to see whats possisble in a new driver. Win8 will not run the PP driver even in 32 bit mode, I tried it already,
so any future for the PP requires a new driver. If I have to do that, I may try a 64 bit version as well.
( Just saying.. lol )

Art