When the screen goes black as you described, it's most likely because the integrated graphics controller is being used instead of the gtx970. Check your NVIDIA settings. You can select the NVIDIA processor to be used globally or add Mastercam via the Program Settings tab.

As Thad noticed, certain printer drivers do not report their color status correctly to Mastercam. To force the printer color option, see this article: ForceColorPrinting.pdf

Translucency is used by default because the axes are rendered and can therefore become "lost" by being obscured by a solid. You can turn off this default behavior by unchecking the “Use translucent shading” option in the Gnomon settings dialog. Also, it’s useful to add the “Shading Translucency Toggle” button to your Shading toolbar. You can use the button while in Dynamic Xform to turn translucency on and off.

For printing shaded images, MC9 uses the screen resolution and "stretches" the image to fit the page size. X2 and X3 use the printer's resolution instead to produce a higher quality print. To do this may require significant amounts of memory, especially for larger page sizes. This may result in blank pages, lock ups and in some cases, even crashes (checks have been added in X3 -- better yet in X3-MU1 -- to prevent this). To reduce the memory usage, use a lower printer resolution. You can change the resolution via the Property... button in the Print dialog but the setting will last only for the current Mastercam session. If you change the setting via the Control Panel (before you run Mastercam), it will be set properly for all Mastercam sessions.

MattW, You can't do what you'd like to do because the configuration file does not contain all the information it probably should. Ideally, Settings/Configuration.../Shading should allow you to set the default wireframe and shading modes. This would be reflected in the Shading toolbar buttons. That way, Mastercam would use the appropriate mode depending on whether Shading is enabled or not in the configuration. Joel

If you are referring to the config file, Colin, then yes, you are correct. However, I experimented a bit and discovered the sequence that is causing this situation. The problem is with the "Shading active" switch on the Shading configuration page (Settings/Configuration.../Shading). If you check this switch then click "OK" then "Yes" to save the settings, when you exit and restart Mastercam, the display mode will be Shaded. However, if you uncheck this switch and do the same steps, the display mode will be what it was at the time you entered the Configuration dialog. So, the workaround is to make sure the display is in the correct mode before you enter the Shading page to turn off "Shading active". Note that if you are trying to fix the display mode and the switch is already unchecked, you can check it then uncheck it to make the Save settings to... dialog appear when you click "OK". Also, note that you may have to fix both the English and metric settings. I have entered this problem in the bug log.

The first 'X' version to support multi-viewport printing was X2. In prior versions, only the primary viewport was printed.

The slowdown described for both Xform Drag and turning off levels when using a gradient background will be corrected in version X2.

...(really I mean give me a break changing the freaking color ???? affects the printing ???) Yes, sort of. The problem isn't really the color, it's the color index -- namely, color index 0. As a work-around, try the following. Go into Settings/Configuration.../Colors and set the "Graphics background color" to something other than 0. Next, click on Customize... and select black. Save the settings. Lines should now print correctly.

The problem with the black background has been fixed in SP1. The print quality for non-shaded output has been fixed as well. The quality for shaded output is unchanged.