[Concreteman]

Hi
I am new to the CNC world so I am by far the weakest link in the chain as I need to learn everything from scratch.

I have recently bought a 4 year old Chinese 3 axis CNC 2nd hand from someone in the uk. This came with an old 32bit Win. NT PC running Artcam Pro v8 and NCStudio. This system all seems to work OK but seems very slow.

I have been playing around with the software and cutting a few tests with varying degrees of success.

I would like to be able to learn to use Artcam and NCStudio during the evenings, on a computer at home (not in my dusty, cold workshop) but all my home computers are newer 64bit Windows 10 systems so I cant run either software on them.
Clearly the obvious thing to do is to buy another old PC, NCStudio + PCI card and load the software... but this seems crazy as I would be investing in very old tech. to learn very old software.

Please can someone tell me in layman's terms:
What would be involved in upgrading Artcam on a faster 64bit windows PC to run the CNC, that will also allow me to spend time learning the software on an equivalent PC at home. I don't believe NCStudio will work at all on a 64bit PC?

To compound the issue, I understand that Artcam is no longer being sold, so do I need to look at Mach3 or similar (is this an equivalent to Artcam?) and can I simply buy another CAM software like Mach3 and expect it to work with NCStudio or do I need to change from NCStudio as well if I were to move from Artcam and if so what is the alternative to NCStudio.

Thanks in advance for any help you can provide

[ger21]

A similar program to ArtCAM would be Vectric's Aspire.

Note that the copy of ArtCAM you have was probably illegally supplied with the machine. ArtCAM 8 was probably about $7000 when new.