explain
Micro$oft end of support for Win7 eminent.
Handy to have internet in the shop for looking up specs, constants, formulas and whatnot. No room or patience for 2 machines out there.
Antique CNC controller (Super-Tech EMC-XYZ-BX) has no drivers or config info for Linux, figured this out after 3 different distro installs.
Turns out, Mach3 parallel port driver absolutely will not work in a 64bit environment, figured this out after setting up a salvaged machine with win10 already on it.
Started to re-purpose another older box, kept hanging on install, several hours to track that down to a flaky CPU, have to do a win7 install first because this thing won't boot from USB, finally get that all worked out and...
now having to sidestep Micro$oft account creation and muzzle Cortana and turn off all the spylemetry (that they let you), so far it has been 3 days of walking in place and I don't even know if this is going to driver up its PCI-parallel card and work yet
and being reminded that I have to go through Linux dependency hell on all the rest of the boxen by Jan 14...
Ever tried virtualisation?
VMware did a pretty good job at running 32 bit OS like WinXP in a window, while passing through USB hardware from the host OS (win10 64bit).
So if mach3 is running on a decent USB-PPT interface, i'd check that too.
I have run my car's OBD stonage interface via USBCOM serial port-USB bridge controller under such configurations successfully.
Well worth a try, imo. And oracle's virtualbox should do it sufficiently, too (for free).
EDIT: I googled "usb parallel port mach 3" and judging by the first three results it shouldn't be much of a problem to get things running that way.