Thankyou Roger. Ill try and implement this asap. Regards, T

I just cant wait. Its just taking to long for the post docu CD to get here. What i want to do is th have MC pop up a custom dialogbox where the user has to type in some custom info that is then written to the Header of the NC file. Anyone have any tips? Regards, Thomas W

Hi all. I have heard roumors about a plugin for Rhino to communicate with MC. Anyone know more about this?

Post class?! Didnt eve know there was classes on offer. It has proven near impossible to even get ahold of the CD with info on writing posts here in the UK. Mainly due to James fourth reason; loss of revenue. Anyone know of classes in the UK? Thomas W

I had some serious problems with this card. After a lot of fiddling around it still does not work correctly with the verification. Stay away from it. All the Nvidia cards are great. Geforce cards are really for gaming and more geared towards textured polygons and overlays, none of which are used in Mastercam. The Quadro based cards have better line drawing and antialiasing. it also does a better job of drawing intersecting and overlapping surfaces. Recently got a Quadro4 64MB. Works perfectly with all my 3ed software. Including QIII Good luck.

all comes down to graphics card really. look for cards that really do full open gl accelleration. geforce and quadro chips are pretty reliable. wouldnt go for the Radeon though, ive had problems with it and OGL with mastercam

Back up all your stuff and reinstall the system. Do a clean install. If it still kills it self then give it back. Sounds like hardware problems to me.

since my previous struggles with getting a ati radeon to work with mc i have bought quadro cards. i see a big differance in ogl line rendering compared to the gforce, the textured polygon rendering is more or less the same. you cant go wrong if you get this card.

hi abut gaming devices: most of them have programmable buttons(all). microsofts 'strategic commander' and 'sidewinder' controls can be assigned keystrokes. they would infact work quite well with regular software. thomas w

hi. my post about the redraw errors on an ati radeon card sort of guides the choice. the conclution was to stay away from any machine with a graphicscard that doesnt fully support open gl. there are laptops with pro ogl graphics like the quadro. think dell has one. all the geforce family cards seem to do an exelent job with mastercam and other cad software i have used. not so with some highend animation softwares, but thats a different story. i think you can safely go for any major brand machine with a geforce card. thomas w

hahaha! told the guys at ironcad once that i wanted controls like in quake for my cam orientation. -always run -fov 90 -strafe -mouse look -swich weapon(tools) on the mouse wheel. they sort of stared at me blankly for about two seconds and went on to talk about autocad import. too bad i was serious. thomas w

u have to allocate more ram for the app to operate in. do this in the screen->configure menu. the default settings are pretty low for modern machines. thomas w

ten, 10 there are a lot of improvements i would like to se happening in terms of workflow and 3d viewports. too many clicks needed to do certain things and the manipulation of the camera is really slow/cumbersome. the general archaic feel of the interface is even more frustrating when you know how well mc does all the underlying and imprtant aspects of cnc programming. it really is the best when it comes to creating toolpaths, but it is way behind when you look at the interface. i just love the graphic feel to catias nc module. also i would like to see more interactive in/out functionallity built into the software. at present all you can do is save/load/print. to be able to link certain aspects and parameters would be really nice. im doing some experimenting with letting expernal software access the plaintext databases and files of mc to see what can be done. tools, etc the external linkin would help prevent errors with programmers working on incorrect outdated parts and it would also allow the entire production cain to take bigger part in the machining. we do furniture and architectural work, and for us this makes a lot of sense since the material variations drives some of the design. yeah, ten. so much to wish for. -add more i/o and database capabilities -insert mc as an integrated module into several of the cad systems exsisting. -make the mc server completely independent of the client(dont know if it even is a client/server setup). that way we could make our own interfaces to suit our needs/workingstyle/industry. more than anything i want a complete product lifecycle managemant system based on a descriptive product data language. catia is great but it is to restraining to productivly model in and the nachining isnt up to par with mc. its also really expensive. enough of my rambling, thomas w

even better would be if you could port it out to an extertnal linked database. then it would really start making sense and have a meaning to more people. the shop guy, the planners, the designers... i seem to be the only person in the whole world who likes to view my parts in perspective rendering. important to us cos the verification drives the design in some instances. thomas w

thanks doug. found out multicam are leaning more towards alphacam and are a bit reluctant to support. ill talk to andy to get the post sorted. thomas w