The line numbers all the way to the left in the Mastercam editor are not sequence numbers, and they are not written into the NC file. They are like the ruler that shows up on the border when you use a wordprocessor like Word, and are used in much the same way for dealing with the line-number-based error messages that MP.DLL generates if there is a problem. If you enable the output of sequence numbers you'll see two sets of line numbers on the left - one that comes from the editor (on the left margin) that isn't part of the NC file and a second one that maches the sequence nubmer format your post and control def specified (immideatly to the right of the editor's line numbers).

The op defaults are part of the control definition. Each control definition you use can point to a different default file.

In-House Solutions (the folks that run this site) has some great courseware for MasterCAM classes, as well as an instructor workbook that provides lots of useful info for gettign the class off the ground. The certification course from CNC software is very nice, too. your education reseller should have some nice resources avalible for you, too.

quote: I cannot think of one major professional piece of software or minor for that matter, that you can get an open listing of known bugs, in a current release.Autodesk posts tons of information on thier support site, as does Microsoft. Cadalyst magazenes compiles and maintains an extensive buglist (with work-arounds where possible) for AutoCAD and related products.

quote: The HP weighs 9.5 lbs plus I have external floppy dive,flash drive, serial port replicator, mouse, usb extension cable, and mastercam post book I carry in back pac back and forth to work. It isn't to bad.Oh. My. God. And I thought I had it bad. My D800 has serial and paralell ports, so I don't have to lug them. As for the manuals - that's why 60GB USB-powered hard drives, 80GB internal drives, and PDF files were invented. I keep the post manual, Machinery's Handbook 26, and a bunch of other stuff like that on the hard drive, while the external drive carries all the ISO images of CDs I might need. Italian' stylin': I've been way busy. Not getting to see my clients in Hawaii as often as I'd like (I'm going to Honolulu next month though ), but I get to see my clients all over the rest of Californa and Nevada pretty often, so that makes up for it. Kinda.

quote: Just bought an HP zd7000 w/ a 3.4 and HT. It has an NVidia Chipset and I'm liking it.How portable is that monster? My D800 at ~7lbs plus the supporting equipment (power supply, mouse, cables, ect.) is enough of a bear to lug around that I find myself somewhat envious of my wife's 4lbs Gateway. As for the P4 with HT vs Pentium-M issue. Some things to keep in mind when selecting a processor: - Intel CPU familys in the post-486 era have often been less efficent on a cycle-for-cycle basis than the previous generation. Personal experence here - my PPro overclocked to 233MHz outperformed a PII at 233MHz, and PIII CPUs at 1GHz were signifigantly faster than P4s at 1.4 and 1.6GHz. It wasn't until P4 speeds got over 2.0GHz that they started to pull away from the PIIIs at 1.0 and 1.13GHz. - The Pentium M is not a slower version of a P4. It's essentially a much faster version of a PIII. Look here for a heads-up comparison: Tom's Hardware The non-overclocked P-M at 2.1GHz outperforms even the P4EE in just about everything but synthetic benchmarks. No real surprise, given that it's essentially a PIII running at a higher clockspeed. - HT has the potential to comprimise MasterCAM performance the same way that multi-processor systems do. Given the way the scheduler works, you end up thrashing the L2 cache into uselessness.

quote: some people like to use a .500 em with a 1/4 radi and others like to use a 1/2 em with a .250 radi which one are you?I got a box of 1/2" end mills with a .251 rad...

DaveR: Let me try to clear things up a bit. If you use the corner of the stock for your work offset: - You must use a different work offset for each index position - You must not have any A moves in your code - You can set your TLOs to the top of the block, but must make adjustments for each work offset. - You don't need to know where the center of roation is. - You may use named views/WCS to locate Program Zeros whereever you wish If you use the rotation center of the block (centerline of the A axis) - You only need one work offset - located at the rotaiton center - Your code will contain A moves - You cause indexing to occur by rotating the tool plane in MasterCAM about the X axis. - Your TLOs are set to the centerline of the A axis. - Look in your MCAM9MILLMC9SAMPLESMULTI AXIS folder for a file named ROATRY 4X.MC9 for an example of how to locate the part and the program zero. For multi-axis cutting, you have to locate the part WRT the machene's coordinate system for the angles and such to resolve correctly. Indexing is a special case - you can, if you choose, treat indexing as if it were a collection of fixtures laid out on the table. But that means a lot more time spent in set-up, more opportunity for error, and a lot less flexability in programming.

From a support standpoint, XP Home presents you with difficulties that XP Pro dosn't. Home editon, when running on the NTFS files system, still uses file and directory permissions, but dosn't provide any easy interface to them without either booting in Safe Mode or futzing aroud with CACLS.EXE at the command line. Since license management services don't generaly run in Safe Mode, that makes dealing with permissions issues a lot more difficult on Home than on Pro.

If you are indexing only, locating the various sides by finding the corners of the block, and assigning them different work offsets, and you don't have any A moves in your code, then you don't need to worry about the locaoiton of the axis centerline. This limits you to dealing with each side as a seperate program, and will force you to use (and find) a lot of work offsets, each of which will have different values for X,Y,Z, and A. What I do is locate the program zero on the centerline of the A axis. Then I touch all the tools off to a 1-2-3 block on the table and use a test indicator to find the distance from the 1-2-3 block to the rotation center. Since the rotaiton center and the table are always in the same place, the only thing I need to change or find for a new set-up is the X and A coordinate for the work offset. This allows me two different approaches to the program: - Use one work offset and rotate the tool plane in MasterCAM as needed to cut on different sides. - Use several work offsets, one for each index position. All of these offsets will have the same X,Y, and Z values with A being the only part that changes.

Don't use SolidWorks here (we're an Autodesk VAR), but we've got XP with SP2 on all our systems and MasterCAM runs without any problems. Same with the systems at my school.

My notebook uses a GeForce 5650 Go with NVIDIA/Dell driver version 45.81. It works very well with MasterCAM, even at full performance with 32-bit color.

Thad: I've been getting better. Some loss of range in the sholder that looks to be perminant, but recovery is moving right along. I've been real busy lately - my company has me doing quite a bit of traveling over the past year. It's kinda fun, especially when I get sent to Hawaii... cadist: That's a possibility, but he did say that it was working up until recently. My money is on somethign in the system having changed rather than an incompatability.

Ron and jmparis: You can import toolpaths (and thier associated geometry) directly from an existing MC9 file as well as from an operations library (OP9 file). For storing frequently-used operation groups, the ops library is the way to go, no quesiton. For a one-off kind of thing (like merging a set of toolpaths) importing from an MC9 file is 'da bomb'.

Have you made any chages to your system recently? Some things that could have affected it: - Updating a video driver - Installing a game (sometimes that updates or changes video components) - Changing video driver settings What video card do you have in the system?

The R9 tracker works for all versions of Inventor I have tried. What kind of R8 file were you trying to import? Some file types don't actually contain a useful solid model.

You'll need the design tracker installed on your PC to do the conversion. Design tracker(s) can usually be downloaded from here: Autodesk Data and Downloads page for AIS but they don't seem to have any R9 files up yet. If Inventor is being used in your company, you can install the design tracker from the Inventor CD. Assuming the CD is drive D, go to d:binacadfeuiDesignTracking and run setup. Or you can just put the CD in the CD ROM drive, select 'Install' from the start-up screen, and under Step 3 select Autodesk Inventor View. That will install the viewer and design tracking both. You might also want to install the Vault client if your company is planning on taking advantage of Inventor's document management system. Once you get the tracker on your system, translation of files created in the new version will work fine.

I ain't talking abut sending your own work out. I'm talking about taking thier client's work in. eMachenshop is a broker, not a machene shop.

Thanks Dave. I think that's it. Those lines aren't commented out in the MPMASTER-based posts I'm using. I'll forward that to my client.

quote: Have any of you guys updated your laptops to XP SP2? I have. I needed to so I could figure out what kinds of problems my clients will experence. So far most everything is working out pretty much like I expected. Non-network stuff works fine, and network stuff mostly works fine, 'sept for some remote control apps and the like.

cadcam: quote: Rick, I went to the Dell site and basically priced out what you got and with 512 of ram it is saying like $2916.00 WOW that is high from my view but dell does make good laptops.You gotta be careful when you customize a Dell system. By default Dell includes stuff like a spare primary battery ($50.00), MS Office ($319.00), a docking station ($199.00), a cheap-xxxx nylon case ($70.00) and a bunch of other stuff you likley don't actually want. Current price from the Dell store for the system I got (with 1GB RAM) is $2,629.00. Yeah, it's a lot of money. But I use it every day, I'm gonna be using it for two or three years, and I use it for lots of things, including service and support of our RP machenes and preparing seminars. quote: What did you get for hard drive?80GB. I need lost of space 'cause I do a lot more than MasterCAM with it. It's my support and presintation system, so I got to have AutoCAD, Inventor, Arch Desktop, 3D Studio MAX and VIZ, combustion, MagicsRP, and a double-dozen other things. The 'basic' software load was somewhere north of 20GB before I added so much as a text file. Working with video-related stuff like combusiton and MAX eats up hard drive space in a hurry. quote: How much do you say it weights?With the extra battery about 8lbs or so. It's ~the same as the Gateway 9550 it replaced. As much as I like it, I gotta admit that my wife's 300XL (4lbs) makes me wistful sometimes... quote: Also how do you like 15 wide screen?Fookin' awesome. I got the middle resolution one (1680x1050, or WSXGA+) rather than the high rez option. One of my clients has an M60 with the WSUXGA screen and I was afraid that it'd be too small to live with. WSXGA+ is a nice comprimise. One of the coolest things the wide screen allows is side-by-side editing of posts and .NC files. It's wide enough that I can have two normal sized edit windows next to each other. It's almost as good as having a second monitor, while still being portable.

If you haven't downloaded the software yet, have a look at it. It's surprisingly fuctional for such a small program, though it does need internet access to download price lists. Is it likely to put folks like James out of busness? Not a chance in hell. For simple 2D and 2.5D stuff, though, it's not half bad. Ifn I ran a job shop, I'd take a serious look at becoming a vendor.

Google's language preference is set by a cookie google places on your computer. Arabic happens to be the first choice on the (alphibetized) list. To change your language preference, go here: Google Language Preferences and select English (or whatever) from the list.

FWIW: I just got a new Dell Latitude D800 with the 128MB GeForceFX Go 5650, 1680x1050 screen, and a Pentium M 1.8GHz CPU. It does a bangup job with MasterCAM, Inventor, AutoCAD, Combusiton, and 3D Studio MAX. Plays games (Uru, mainly) well, too. I was looking at the 5150 before I settled on this one, but decided that the extra video RAM and built-in bluetooth (I've got a bluetooth phone and PDA) were more useful than the hyperthreading offered by the 5150. The avalibility of an extra battery is a real plus, too. With both batteries in it lasts a lot longer than I'm willing to mess with it in one sitting. 6+ hours, or so the meter claims. The only downsides: - Fookin' massively heavy and large notebook. Not nearly as bad as some of the 17", 15+ pound beasts from HP, but a real drag on the shoulder nonetheless. - Floppy drive shares the same bay as the CD-ROM (and extra battery), or can be connected via an included cable. On the ATI stuff: the latest chipsets are kinda interesting. ATI's low-end FireGL stuff seems to borrow from the NVIDIA model. That is they use the same GPU for high-end consumer and low-end CAD, with the difference down to driver features. Hopefully that means that the 'prosumer' stuff will be more stable. Then again, ATI's problems seem to be driver related, not shortcomings in the hardware.

One thing to try if you are getting a lot of lag in opening files is to make sure that your system time and the server's time are in synch. Netware and Windows both time-stamp communications, and if the time isn't right it can introduce delays. Winnie: I'll take a look for those files and see if there is anything useful in them. Is there anything I need to do to enalbe .log files, or is that an automatic function?