Greetings, I just finished downloading the new 8.1 dated 01/26/01 and installed it and it works great now. Verify is blazing fast Almost as fast as backplot. SO far this is the best Mcam yet. Thanks for the help. Scott

Fartz, Thanks for the reply. Unplugging the network is not an option here at HP. Our network guys would pitch a major fit if we started unplugging the network. Since we'll be going to the netHASP pretty soon I'd say that Mcam should make sure it works with pretty much all networks, especially one from a company that basically created networks. Scott

Dave, Mine is dated 1/12/01 so I guess it's not the final release. It was sent to us by our local Mastercam dealer last week. I guess I need to wait for another update. Thanks for the help. Scott

MCam Dealer, Thanks, but that didn't work. I also have found that the gap settings button no longer works with 8.1 release although it did with beta 4. Scott

Luther, Thanks for the reply, but I have the released version not the beta. I had beta 4 and it worked fine also. Now I have the released version which uninstalled the beta and these things that I mentioned no longer work. Scott

Greetings, I've just installed V8.1 release 1 and have a couple issues. For some reason Alt Z no longer works, and when I verify, there is no toolbar that will allow me to run verify. Both of these functions worked in 8.1 beta 4, however 8.1 uninstalled beta 4 so I cannot go back to it without reinstalling. Wassup??!! Did they release too soon? Scott

Greetings, We have a post for Anilam series 1100 that works just fine. I needed to tweak the supplied one but I got it to work fine. If you want to email me I can turn you onto it. Scott

Greetings, It turns out that it is the new Mastercam File dialog box. The one that lets you see a thumbnail of your parts. Running CNCReg and going back to the windoze file/save solved the problem. It's nice to know i'm not losing my mind quite yet.

Greetings, Ok, I know I've posted about this before and some of you think I'm just not paying attention to where I'm saving my files, but I've been using Mastercam for 7 years now and I think I know what I'm doing. My files keep disappearing!!! I will be working on a file and go to file/save and it is NOT there to be overwritten. If I do a file/get the one I am currently working on is NOT listed in the dialog box and neither is the one that preceeded it. I do a file search in windows and the file is NOT on my hard drive. Anywhere!! All the recut files are there, but NO MC8 file. WHAT IS GOING ON!!?? I've lost THREE files in the last TWO days because of this. I repeat I am not a rookie with Mastercam, I have been the Mastercam guru and advocate in our shop for three years. I use Mastercam at least 6 hours a day 5 days a week, I have NEVER had this problem with V7. I need to get this fixed ASAP. If there is anyone at CNC software that can resolve this, please email me at [email protected]. Thanks, Scott

Greetings, This is something I just forwarded to my local Mcam dealer. I thought it would be relevent to post it here also so others can add to it or make other suggestions. Thanks, Scott P.S. Does anybody else get script errors on this forum page? ============================================= V8 is a big improvement over V7, however, there are several issues that need to be dealt with. I'm sure I'm not the only one to bring these up. 1. File handling. What keeps happening to my files? I save a file, then a little while later I go to save it again and it's not there. Sometimes it dumps me to root D with no way to get back to the working directory without first going to the desktop then back up. I can live with this hassle for the time being but we have 20 guys who are experiencing the same problem. Is there a fix available? 2. Solids. The solid module is great, however, this morning I come in and loaded the file I had been working on yesterday and all of the changes that had been made to the solid body were gone. I opened up the solid manager and saw a whole bunch of red X's. I tried to regen but it wouldn't let me. I kept getting a parasolid kernel error. So I had to delete the history and start over; aarrgghh!!! I couldn't regen cutter paths either, as it said there was no geometry associated with the toolpath. 3.It keeps changing directories on me. NCI files, nc code files, MC8 files all seem to change places without any reason. At least I haven't been able to see any pattern for it, they just seem to go into folders where they don't belong. 4. Right clicking in the operation manager to copy or move ops only works sometimes. Sometimes I have to try it three or four times before it will move or copy. 5. General instability. We are getting alot of application errors. Sometimes when translating SAT files, sometimes after regening a toolpath, sometimes when translating geometry, sometimes when doing a verify. This is exteremly frustrating. Using autosave is not an option with V8, it's a necessity. Some enhancements I would like to see are: 1. On the change levels dialog box, have a button to make the inputted level visible or invisible. Keep last layer entered in level number box. Add layer name to dialog box. 2. On all menus (left side) make window selection modal. After window selection it always goes back to single entity selection. 3. Make trim modal, if two entities don't intersect it dumps out of trim mode. This has been a pet peeve for several versions now. 4. When using mask to select entities, put "colors" somewhere more accessable. It currently takes about 12 mouse clicks to mask by color.

Greetings, I'm running V8 on a HP Visualize workstation with a Visualize FX video card and 256 megs of ram running NT4 sp5. I have found no slow down problems even when running Solid Designer, ME10, Autocad, Outlook, Word and IE4. All at the same time. The only time I have a slow down is when I am running 2 sessions of Mastercam at the same time then it really bogs down to a crawl. It might help if you change your allocations. Mine are set at, in order top to bottom, 6000, 6000, 500, 60000, 100000. Hope this helps. Scott

Greetings, I'm wondering if anyone out there is using Mastercam to program wire EDM's. Mastercam seems to be a little lacking in this area. We have 2 Charmilles wire machines, a Robofil 2000 and 310. We are specifically looking for a good post processor. The one we have is only marginal and no one at MCam seems willing to invest alot of time helping us. Our wire guy is big on Esprit because they have implemented various controls into their software. We are commited to Mastercam for milling and want to stay with Mastercam for wire but they are several years behind other wire packages in the features that are offered. Does anyone know if there are any plans to bring Mastercam up to speed on the wire package. In the meantime any help with a post would be appreciated. Thanks, Scott

Eduard, Excellent request. I would like like the same info for V8. Scott

Greetings, Occasionaly when I go to save the file, the original file is not there. Mastercam doesn't ask me if I want to overwrite the old file. Also, if I double click on a file to get it, the file doesn't open but dumps me into another folder. I must click once then click open. It seems as if there is still some work to be done on various aspects of V8, File/Save/Get just being one of them. Has anybody else experienced these problems and if so is Mastercam aware of them. Scott

Greetings, I have the file save problem also. Also, at times, when I double click on a file, it tells me the filefolder not found. When I single click and then hit open it works fine. I'm running NT4 sp6. Scott If we were all running Macs, we wouldn't have these problems