Hi John,
your story of frustration an anger at products that don't work and are largely unsupported is all too common and Chinese manufacturers are grossly over-represented
in that category.
The following manufacturers have all been in the Mach market for a long time and have built a great reputation selling and supporting Mach3 products.
I have limited this list to those of them who produce boards which are Mach4 ready and have a reliable Mach4 plugin ready to go. I should point out that
while all of these are good they are not all the same. A time passes various functions which are enacted by the controller, not Mach4, are added. So for
instance PMDX smart BoBs don't have Backlash compensation whereas the Hicon does and the ESS has got it but still buggy. Having said that they all
work and do the basic stuff well, but if you need some specific feature like backlash compensation, or THC, or lathe threading you'll need to do some more
research.
https://www.pmdx.com/https://warp9td.com/http://www.vitalsystem.com/portal/index.phphttps://www.poscope.com/https://www.cncdrive.com/And to complete the list I'll add one more, they make great Mach3 products but by their own admission their Mach4 plugin is still developing, is does work but you'll
need some patience, but you'll also have some superb hardware.
http://en.cs-lab.eu/Take a look at all the offerings. By all means ask for advice and opinions on the forum, advice and opinions can be had for free, its too late if you've already shelled
out bucks for something that doesn't work.
Craig