jeeybee,

I have purchased Mach3 and Mach4. I also own the KFLOP which comes with KmotionCNC. Honestly, Mach4 lost a good deal of market share due to the very long delay in the release, and when it finally came out it had very limited support for motion control hardware. The package is clearly designed for motion controllers, however they do have a $25 plugin for the Parallel port from Art. If you download and play with Mach4 the first thing you will notice is the screen set is probably one of the nicest features, just beautiful and very well thought out. I have it running with the Ethernet Smoothstepper and the motion is very fluid. I have my Mach4 machine 80% finished and have homing, pendant, and spindle control all working. I am in the middle of rebuilding that machine so built a brand new control box with ESS and all the sourcing hardware. I can move the machine very nice just doing some of the final mechanical aspects of the machine and have been side tracked with my wife's projects for months. I can load gcode and it runs very smooth. Their support for other motion control hardware is growing, the latest version of hobby is 4.2.0.3390 which I just downloaded this morning. They also have the industrial version which is where I think they have spent so much of their time the last year or so, but that is way beyond the hobby crowd. I would download it and give it a try. The challenge is the unlicensed version only run maybe five minutes so you can't really do much testing. I still run a machine with Mach3 which still runs just fine. If you are looking to buy a hardware motion controller, the KFLOP is very well supported, and their KmotionCNC software is rock solid. It never goes off and does something unexpected, so that aspect I just love. If KmotionCNC had the Mach4 front end it would be a one stop shop for me. So for me I run three machines and they all have their strong and weak points.

Russ