Hi Ken,
if you are an industrial user then yes you need one licence per machine, and Mach4Industrial is $1400.
Mach4Hobby for $200 allows you to have five PCs activated on one licence. Like Stuart my laptop inside is licenced as is my mill PC in the garage.
Given that mostly my laptop is just for development and experimentation it would be adequate that it run the Sim plugin in which case it doesn't
need to be licenced either. There are a few occasions where I will use my laptop to run my machine, all I have to do is plugin the ESS and my pendant
and for this reason my laptop copy of Mach4 is licenced.
Should I buy another PC I can release the licence on the old one and activate the new one. NFS allow up to seven such licence transactions in a two year period.
The licence conditions are somewhat stricter than Mach3, remember that Mach3 is plagued with pirate copies which is a loss to NFS. The PCID method of licencing
is the more modern method of licence allocation and will in some way limit the proliferation of pirate copies.
When in Demo mode Mach4 runs normally for six minutes before it needs to be restarted. Mach3 will run 500 lines of code before stopping. Little to pick and
choose between them, they both work adequately for testing purposes, if you want better from either, buy a licence. At $200 and $175 respectively that makes
it one of the cheapest software purchases you will find unless you go for LinuxCNC.
Craig