But it was a hack at best - and problematic to say the least. It kinda clever what Artsoft figured out how to do, they hacked a driver between the bios and windows that uses a timer on the sound card circuitry to generate an interrupt and attempts to get that precise timing. That is fine for spreadsheets, but will never work for controlling a stepper motor. The smallest increment of time to windows software is one second, and that is minus however many clock cycles it takes to get around to handing it to you after it finishes whatever else it was doing at the time you requested it. The problem is that Windows does not have the ability to do precise timing. Whenever we get a call about some weird issue we have never heard of before, the first question we ask is which software, and nine times out of 10 the answer is Mach3 - no joke. In fact Artsoft announced last year they would discontinue support for Mach3 because they could not get the parallel port driver to run on 64bit Windows.

Our controllers will work on any parallel port control software, but the reason why we use LinuxCNC on our machines *instead* of Mach3 is because Mach3 is too buggy to be taken serious as an industrial controller. This would never be acceptable to a commercial user who requires maximum uptime - especially not for a paid software product. Artsoft does not have a phone number you can call for help - they force you though the forums and community for help. It is true that there is a ton of information on the internet about Mach3, but this is simply because Mach3 users tend to *need* more online help, rather than because it is the industry standard. Can I use Mach3 with Your Machines/Controllers?

Mach3 for windows 10