Greetings everyone!

I am so glad to have a good community of other Hurco owners and operators. I have reached out to my machine dealer and Hurco's service department, and while they are great with our new Winmax systems, they don't offer much support for our 2005-2006 Ultimax controllers. We have 2 VM1's and a VM3 on the way out the door. Hurco service had zero answers for us to get through this problem below, but I'm hoping some of you with real world experience on these Hurcos can help me out. I also greatly look forward to being active and help others out with problems I may have resolved over the past 8 years on these machines. Anyways, here we go:

We use Mastercam Draft9 to send/receive our programs to our Ultimax machines via RS232. Whenever it sends back to our computer, it saves the programs as .Txt or .NC files even though they are conversational. Because of this, we cannot import the files in the Winmax machines. Winmax requires an .HD3 extension to open. If I save the files as .HD3, Winmax says "this file is not a true .HD3 file". The only way we can get a true .HD3 file is to save from Ultimax to a floppy drive and put it on our network for Winmax to open.

To figure out why this happens, I saved the same program to a floppy disk as a true .HD3 file, and then sent the program via RS232 saved as a .NC. Next I opened them both in Notepad- their formatting and characters are completely different These are the same program, just 2 different ways of saving.

In regards to this, I have a few questions. First, we have found there are really 2 ways we have to convert programs to true .HD3. The first is to send our current conversational .NC extension program into the Ultimax via RS232, then save it to the floppy as a .HD3, take that floppy and send it back to the network. It's slow and tedious, and doesn't offer a good solution for converting hundreds of programs to .HWM.

The second way is to hook up our Ultinet which is available on only one of our machines, and try to use that to open our files. Whether that will allow us to open our .NC extension, then save back as .HD3 I'm unsure of. It may require RS232 feeding, then save back via Ultinet, thus bypassing the floppy drive at least.

I have heard of some people using a floppy emulator to bypass the floppy at least, but it still isn't that efficient. I'd love to be able to RS232 back as a "True .HD3" file, or find a way to convert the .nc/.txt files directly to a "true .hd3" on our desktop.

My questions are these:
1) is there a way to send via RS232 and get it to format as a "True .HD3"?
2) Is there a way to convert from our current .NC format to .HD3 format (basically, convert our one attached file into the .HD3 format seen in the other attached file?)
3) Will Ultinet be able to open our current file type even though it isn't a true .hd3?
4)I've been briefly reading about "PC Max". We have Winmax Mill Desktop, but that doesn't help us in this case. Would PC Max help in this situation, and is it even still available?
5) This one goes a bit far out, but I actually once took our Mastercam Draft computer that we use to send/receive and hooked it up to our Winmax Mill Desktop computer via RS232. I then got the Winmax Desktop into "Serial I/O" mode, and sent a conversational .NC extension Ultimax program from Draft to Winmax Desktop, and although the success rate was low, if Winmax Desktop did take in the whole program, it would convert it upwards like I wanted. This was the fastest and easiest way I found to do it, but often Winmax Desktop would not read the entire program. It must have been a mismatch in RS232 settings there. I'm wondering if something like PC Max still exists, and if it could send/recieve like winmax desktop. I figure I could PC Max on a laptop next to the Winmax Desktop computer, I could just send/receive old Ultimax .NC programs up to .HWM with Winmax Desktop. That seems my best option so far.

Any ideas I'm overlooking?

Thanks for any help you may offer!