dinosaurs and mastercam 8.1

[Bubba1965]

I am a dinosaur and nearly a luddite but i want to help

have a friend who is also a dinosaur he has a Mastercam license such that he always gets updates and new versions sent to him.

he is familiar with Mastercam 8.1 and has made a good living with it.

When his ancient computer died he had the hdd copied to the new computer. his hasp works great with the newer versions of Mastercam.

but cannot get version 8.1 to start and talking to the reseller who says no help or support is available for the older versions such as 8.1

any ideas on how to get up and running again?

mind you that the new software is available but he is so locked into the old version that anything new will not be attempted

[Thad]

Good luck!

[Jobnt]

v8? I thought I was a relic! Had a boss a few years ago that had v8. Or was it 7? Can't remember. I do know when he had to change a toolpath it was a complete feces' festival and he refused to do it unless absolutely necessary.  

[gcode]

V9 and older versions will not run on a usb or older hasp.

Modern OS's will not recognize the hasp.

There is a solution, but it will not be cheap

V9 and older will run on a nethasp ( network license)

To get it running you would have to convert your usb hasp to a nethasp 

Once you have the net hasp setup you will be able to run V8.1, but I don't know if they will even sell you a 1 seat nethasp.

Other than that, your only choice is to learn a more recent version of Mastercam

5 hours ago, Jobnt said:

Or was it 7?

V7 was my introduction to Mastercam

I purchased a seat of 2d lathe and mill in 1997.

 

[byte]

41 minutes ago, gcode said:

 

V7 was my introduction to Mastercam

I purchased a seat of 2d lathe and mill in 1997.

 

I bet you paid less for mill than I did for that mill entry license i bought at the time

[byte]

I could have bought a car lol

[cncappsjames]

[quote]...the reseller who says no help or support is available for the older versions such as 8.1 ...[/quote]

There are limits to what's possible. Sometimes the limiting factor(s) aren't within our sphere of control. Computer hardware is one of those spheres. It's ONLY going to get worse.

[gcode]

4 hours ago, byte said:

I bet you paid less for mill than I did for that mill entry license i bought at the time

Probably.. I was moving from TekSoft/ProCad97 to Mastercam and received a very nice competitive

discount. About a year later I bought the 3D mill module (which included the legacy 5X toolpaths)

and finally I added the solids module, which was an option in those days

[byte]

56 minutes ago, gcode said:

Probably.. I was moving from TekSoft/ProCad97 to Mastercam and received a very nice competitive

discount. About a year later I bought the 3D mill module (which included the legacy 5X toolpaths)

and finally I added the solids module, which was an option in those days

I wanted to go all in on the full mill package with 5 axis, but all in it was at least 3 times the price of the machine with all the tooling and attachments,

I was told the license i bought would support chook ops so i could make some rudimentary toolpaths for my hobby machine, but that turned out not to be the case, 

I can make toolpaths but i cant simulate them because they are all in top view with shifted wcs, my machine has a little online simulator that is kind of okay,

but i never get much done, not enough hours in the day, 

 

nuff said i should have tested it before buying, expensive mistake

[Newbeeee™]

6 hours ago, gcode said:

V9 and older versions will not run on a usb or older hasp.

Modern OS's will not recognize the hasp.

There is a solution, but it will not be cheap

V9 and older will run on a nethasp ( network license)

To get it running you would have to convert your usb hasp to a nethasp 

Once you have the net hasp setup you will be able to run V8.1, but I don't know if they will even sell you a 1 seat nethasp.

Other than that, your only choice is to learn a more recent version of Mastercam

V7 was my introduction to Mastercam

I purchased a seat of 2d lathe and mill in 1997.

 

OP said his friend always gets the latest sent to him. So by that statement, I assume he is paying annual maintenance...which is a HUGE amount of wasted corn for V9, X, X2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023.... If Bytey could have bought a car, OP's friend could have bought a garage to house it!

So that said, although obviously unsupported, I'd like to think the reseller goes the distance and helps out here....

[Jobnt]

5 minutes ago, Newbeeee™ said:

So that said, although obviously unsupported, I'd like to think the reseller goes the distance and helps out here....

This. 

[Aaron Eberhard]

21 hours ago, Newbeeee™ said:

So that said, although obviously unsupported, I'd like to think the reseller goes the distance and helps out here....

The reality is that the reseller very possibly doesn't have anyone on staff who was around during the parallel-port to USB HASP days..  Gotta figure that V9 came out in, what 2000/1?  V8 was 1996?

That means that their tech support/applications team may literally not be have any experience solving a 32 bit parallel-hasp issue on a 64 bit operating system... 

My first try would be to set up an old system running windows 95 and see if you can get it working on there.  If I recall, there was an issue with the driver compatability for the hasp key (was it an alladin?) that no one has ever solved for anything older than V9 on a modern OS.

 

[gcode]

4 hours ago, Newbeeee™ said:

OP said his friend always gets the latest sent to him. So by that statement, I assume he is paying annual maintenance...which is a HUGE amount of wasted corn

Maintenance didn't kick in till X

Prior to that you paid for each major update as it was released so you could go 18 months to 2 years + without having to write a check.

Still, in rough back of a napkin guestimates, you'll looking at north of $40K to keep a full seat current all these years.

You'd think whoever was writing those checks would expect an ROI of some sort. Seems kind of weird.

At any rate the options are clear

1. Buy a nethasp license if they will sell you a 1 seat net hasp 

2. Build a Win 3.1 machine , V9 ran well on Win2000 and even XP.. I don't know about V8

3. learn to use a modern version that will run on a modern OS.

     This seems the simplest and cheapest course of action IMO

 

[Guy Smith]

You could rebuild the old machine.  Its not impossible to recreate or FIX the old machine. 

 

[gcode]

I wonder if V8 would run on a virtual Win 3.1 setup??

I binged "Virtual Windows 3.1 " and got a ton of hits

Might be a fun project to see if it could be done

 

Easily Run Windows 3.1 in VirtualBox

[byte]

3 hours ago, gcode said:

I wonder if V8 would run on a virtual Win 3.1 setup??

I binged "Virtual Windows 3.1 " and got a ton of hits

Might be a fun project to see if it could be done

 

Easily Run Windows 3.1 in VirtualBox

Running a Windows 3.1 VM in Virtualbox (i12bretro.github.io)

 

Here is a more detailed guide to installing a VM

[MIL-TFP-41]

If he insists on running V8.1, I would go to ebay & find a retro Dell or similar that is running Windows 98. Odds are if he is that stuck in his ways running a virtual machine is not going to happen.

It can be a challenge to find all the older drivers & things like that, but not impossible. Hopefully he has the installation disks for Mastercam around.

Does he have a parallel HASP or USB?

[Matthew Hajicek - Singularity]

I'm pretty sure V8 was around '97 or '98, and parallel port HASPs (though they called them serial port).

 

If you jump through enough hoops it looks like you can install Win 98 on an almost modern AMD computer:

 

[gms1]

hmm i think v6 was 96. I started doing this on v5 in 94.

[gcode]

1 hour ago, gms1 said:

I started doing this on v5 in 94.

I took 3 semesters of V7 classes at a local community college, but

never did any actual work or made any chips with V5.

I purchased V7 but moved to V8 beta within weeks.

That was in late 1998. 

 

[Aaron Eberhard]

So I was thinkin' that we had this debate before and I posted something from the museum, and sure enough:

Back in 2016 I wrote this:

• 1983 - Meghan - Apple IIe  (It was named after Mark's daughter, who is now our President.  Sort of like the Apple Lisa)
• 1984 - Mastercam V1 - 10 Seats
• 1986 - V2 - DOS
• 1990 - V3 -
• 1992 - V4 - 10,000 Seats
• 1994 - V5
• 1996 - V6
• 1998 - V7
• 2000 - V8 - Start of Mastercam Certification
• 2002 - V9
• 2005 - X   - Windows  - 100,000 Seats
• 2006 - X2
• 2008 - X3 - Start of Mastercam for Solidworks
• 2009 - X4 - Dynamic Motion debut - 150,000 Seats
• 2010 - X5
• 2011 - X6
• 2013 - X7
• 2014 - X8
• 2015 - X9 - 200,000 Seats
• 2016 - 2017
• 2017 - 2018 - Coming soon.

So, V8 was 2000. 

[cncappsjames]

Occasionally we get customers that buy used equipment and they pay us to come train them. A LOT of those machines... the guys that trained people BITD are either dead or retired.

A V8 user is probably in their mid-50's at this point.

The BEST O/S for that era hands-down is Windows 2000 Pro. You get decent plug and play and the stability of Windows NT. I may still have an installation CD for that. I can check. There's definitely serial numbers for that floating around. I would not trust an OS download from just anywhere.

I'll see what I can dig up.

[cncappsjames]

I must have dumped my Win2k disks. Oddly I still have a copy of Windows NT 4.0 workstation and Windows NT Server.

Found a fresh... never installed Windows XP Pro SP2 CD w/ product key from my MSDN days... send me a DM I'll send you a link if it'll help.

[Newbeeee™]

All this excitement, but where's the OP?

Perhaps, he's still sailing the seas.... 

 

[byte]

2 minutes ago, Newbeeee™ said:

All this excitement, but where's the OP?

Perhaps, he's still sailing the seas.... 

 

Nice hat noobz, ayhe all y'all would be talking dinosaurs