[ 04-04-2005, 04:26 PM: Message edited by: Avon ]

Pete, thanks for clearing things up!

ftp://mastercam:[email protected] Try this link. I too could not find the site. It was very frustrating. For some reason, this link works. Just navigate to the mastercam folder. If it says begining ftp transaction, and hangs, then your passive settings are wrong.

Cimco edit will run without the hasp. If it does not here is the link to request a new version. http://www.cimco.dk/download_registration....t_Mastercam_OEM

IMNSHO Mori Seiki makes the best machines on earth. Superior quality, and frightningly fast. The new Fanuc controlers are awesome too, as said before with a compact flash card and a pcmcia adapter you can run large programs right from the machine without getting into propriatary PC controllers with failure prone hard disks/components.

BTW, its in your MCAM9/comon/editors/cedit folder. Also, a cheap laptop right next to your machine is a great idea. If you have a network, all you have to do is pull it from the machine you posted to. Plus you have the added benifit of a DNC machine if you ever need to run a large program.

I wouldnt bother with free dnc software. Mastercam comes with Cimco edit lite. You are free to install this program anywhere in your shop. It's in my oppinion the best dnc/editor out there.

The only true solution is to get yourself a decent nVidia card. With prices of a low end PCIx or AGP Quadro FX series card around the 120$ range, there is no reason not to get one. It will save so many headaches! Also make sure you are using the latest and greatest drivers. I usually buy them in the OEM box with no drivers to save some cash, you will need to go online and download the latest drivers anyway. Even an old Quardro 2 Pro works great and you can get them on ebay for 25 bucks.

Fanuc! Mitsus are harder to use in my oppinion.

I think reamers suck. In most cases (shallow) I can get by by just doing a helical bore or a simple contour with an end mill. Make sure your post is set to IJK though, it will produce a rounder toolpath on a slower controler. For a 1/4" holes I use a 7/32 carbide endmill. Make sure you use wear comp so you can rapid in the middle of the drilled hole, or if you helical in you can do a small lead out and rapid out. They come out perfect with the added convinience of cutter comp.

I think there are also instablility problems with toolpath memory being set too high, so you must find a happy number. Officialy MC should be ok with 70% of your total ram, but I think that number is lower.

OK I got the scoop on the problem! MasterCAM does not actualy give back the memory it has allocated untill after your new values are read and accepted. Increasing an already large memory allocation will fail, so the work around is to drop the memory allocation and then increase it or you can change it in the mill.cfg before you open MasterCAM.

I was thinking the same, so I tried increasing the ram on several computers. They all worked fine, except for this one im having trouble with! I even increaesd the allocations on my laptop with 1 gig of ram to the max 2gb, and it still worked.

Hey guys, Im having trouble increasing the toolpath memory allocation on a particular computer running XP with 1.5 gigs of ram MR0304. It does not let me input a number higher than 400,000 Kb. I need to set it to over 600 megs. Yes I know its fairly overkill but the toolpath im working with is 550 megs, and MasterCAM sould be ok with a max toolpath memory allocation of 2 gigs. For some reason this computer gives me an error on closing the config dialog and resets to previous mem values. Any thoughts? Thanks.

I just traded in my ATI Fire GL for a new FX1300. Dam this card is super fast and compatible with everything. I use the latest drivers with open gl settings set to "pro e wildfire II" As far as mastercam goes, i doubt you will have any problems with a quadro card. Even a 50$ quadro 2 pro works flawlessly. Just say no to ATI cards, they are the Devil.

Hardmill, I have read over 50 threads on the cpu usuage issue before posting. But I still have not come to a cold cut answer as to what is causing it. Some say it should run like that, some say their computers work fine. One guy on another forum even swears his CPU usage went down after he swaped an Radeon card for a Geforce. Perhaps I should reword it. Does the CPU Usage Problem affect nVidia Quadro video enabled computers? Does it only Affect ATI video card computers (Radeon or FireGL) only?

Hey guys! I have not heard a definitive answer on the high cpu usage issue that plauges some computers. I have read on a MMSOnline forum that it could be caused by ATI video cards. I have never seen the high cpu usage problem untill I swapped in an ATI Fire GL V3100. (it was a cheap PCIe OpenGL card) Now the CPU usage on a P4 3gh pc with HT is at 50% all the time. This brings the system to its knees. Especialy Open GL apps. As soon as you close MasterCAM everything goes back to normal. Im going to upgrade to an nVidia Quadro FX1300 (this is the least expensive PCIe Quadro currently availible $$$600$$$) in order to solve this problem. This is quite an expensive card so I dont want to buy it if I dont need to. I run other Open GL apps that require an OpenGL video card so gamer cards are not an option. What do you guys think? Will this solve the high CPU problem? Do you guys with Quadros have the high cpu problem? Thanks.