[hornigio]

Hi- Working on a Meistergram machine for a friend.... He's been using the old D.14 DOS software for it and has 1000's of jobs saved in that format, so he want to continue using. His old hard dive bit the dust & no backup disks.

Anyone have have software they could email me?
thanks!
-John in WI

[jarable]

Just joined the group. I have an old Meistergram engraver I inherited from a prior teacher - do you still need the disks? I can make images and email them to you.

[hornigio]

Appreciate the offer. I did wind up finding some Meistergram software that worked.

I've been meaning to upgrade that whole machine for my friend- Signlab or even Mach3 with Corel Draw, etc, but he's old school and actually prefers the old Meistergram stuff.
Go figure.

Thanks again

[jarable]

Great - old software like that can be problematic at best. There are a few archive sites I've come across I like to check ( archive.org is one ).
I'm looking into upgrading the machine as well. Currently running Engravelab 5 on a Windows XP laptop ( it won't run on anything later ) . I'm trying to figure out if the engraver controller speaks G-Code, or is it something proprietary.

[hornigio]

As far as I know it's not G-Code.... it's proprietary. I did try writing some "Meistergram" files from Signlab/Engravelab, but the controller wouldn't recognize them. You got that to work?
I didn't try very hard to get it working, though. Might be some options I needed to change in the Cadlink meistergam.ini file for that machine. Also, the old 720K floppy disk system my friend uses was just not practical.

I did look at the electronics in the box and it didn't look like much of a stretch to find the step & direction pins on the stepper controllers and just use Mach 3. Or new stepper controllers these days are cheap.... It's a nice sturdy machine that is worth saving. I did a similar retrofit on a Vision engraver that had a bad controller. Use it everyday.

[timgo]

Great - old software like that can be problematic at best. There are a few archive sites I've come across I like to check ( archive.org is one ).
I'm looking into upgrading the machine as well. Currently running Engravelab 5 on a Windows XP laptop ( it won't run on anything later ) . I'm trying to figure out if the engraver controller speaks G-Code, or is it something proprietary.

You can use e machine in any Windows version. Windows 10, 8,7, WinXP. You need good software for this.
I have the software that you need for this machine. Let me know if you are interested. [email protected]

[jarable]

I bought a compact flash - IDE adapter and plugged it into the IDE port on the board. I made a power supply splitter from an old PC power supply so I now also have a 20 MB HDD on the engraver - boots much faster, and with a RAM upgrade from an old machine the bonus is I can now play DOOM on it.
I connected another machine to Engrave Lab 5 serial output and captured the data. It looks a lot like G-Code ( lots of repeating patterns starting and sections ), but pretty sure it would take more time than I have to decode it all.