I'm helping a friend resurrect an old Techno-Isel CNC router. The hardware is a Techno MAC 100 controller driving stepper motors. It communicates with the PC via RS-232. The software is a DOS-based app named TECHNO.EXE .

The hardware works - I can jog from the PC and execute a couple of canned programs that I found on the disk.

My problem is that the only file formats that TECHNO.EXE accepts are .NCI (apparently a MasterCAM intermediate format) and a binary format (represented as Intel HEX records) that looks like microcode for a simple controller engine. There microcode seems to be generated from source stored in .ACL files - it's a simple assembly language - but I don't have an assembler/compiler for the language.

I want to drive it with GCode.

There is a .PST file, which I understand to be a machine description that lets mastercam convert the NCI information to machine-specific commands. But that doesn't help me much because the TECHNO app directly reads the NCI file and spits out machine code in the binary format. There's no GCode anywhere to be seen.

I have tried contacting Techno, but so far they haven't been forthcoming with any information or software.

Does anybody know any specific details about any of these file formats? Given specifications, I'm pretty sure I could write conversion software.

Please reply via email - wmb at firmworks dot com .