Ok really new to this and I’m just trying to help a friend out. A US Laser 4050 laser marker was purchased running prolase 95 on an old windows 98 PC. The PC is dead so I said I would build a new one. Long story short I can’t use a newer PC or a newer operating system with the software. I’m now looking into lightburn and was just wondering what I need to look for on a controller. I would like to be running windows 7 or 10 and this is a pretty serious machine so I need it to be fast. My friends shop is not close to me but I am working on getting more info on the machine it self. All I know right now is that it was being controlled with a pcim-dda06/16 pci control board with a db37 connector going to the machine. Any help or suggestions would be appreciated .
Can you confirm the exact model # and provide some pics for reference? I can look into this (I make the Cohesion3D controllers for other lasers and occasionally get asked about support for older machines.)
Buy a used windows 98 machine off eBay. Any other solution is going to be fraught with problems.
That looks like a galvo laser which isn’t currently supported by LightBurn anyway.
Any reason why an upgrade to Prolase10 isn’t possible? It runs under Windows 10 and claims it supports all previous hardware configurations. You can still buy computers with PCI slots that will run Windows 10.
I may end up going with prolase 10. It’s 3 grand to buy. Just trying to save a buck that’s all. This machine is going to do some random printing I’m guessing . I don’t see him doing any production runs or anything so it’s hard to justify that kind of money. But yes I’ve already been talking with prolase and had them give me a price sheet.
I had him take these last week. I will be getting a manual for it Friday off of him. I do also have an old Dell deminsion that I have to toss a power supply in but it has 98 drivers available so I told him I would atleast get him up and running until I have a better solution. As far as windows 10 machines with pci slots I’ve actually been buying Dell precision t3610 tower computers. They are pretty cheap now and one hell of a PC.
That’s a tough pill to swallow.
Well I got the manual for the machine. What info can I provide for someone to maybe help me out here? It’s alot of pages so I’m hoping I’ll be able to have all the info needed.
Just find a used Win98 machine. I strongly recommend you don’t attempt a controller swap on this machine. It is not a trivial project.
That said, if you are bound and determined to do it, we need pictures of the electronics cabinet and the individual modules inside to determine what we are working with.
You still haven’t said whether it uses a galvo laser head. Most laser markers do. That is the first thing we need to address as LightBurn does not support them at this time.
https://www.troteclaser.com/en-us/knowledge/faqs/laser-plotter-vs-galvo-laser/
It is a galvo unfortunately . I may be on the lookout in the future for software that I can use. I got a big fat no way from him when I meantioned the 3 grand upgrade to prolase 10. I was able to configure an old Dell deminsion 4500 with windows 98. Chipset was supported with 98 and the video card was too. Had to remove the Ethernet , dial up modem and sound card as I didn’t have good drivers for them and it made it unstable. Ultimately he wanted to be able to use flash drives to import images into prolase and have a wireless keyboard and mouse. Also wanted to be able to drive a newer monitor. I was able to make all that work. I’m now pricing a new power supply, ide SSD, ide cables and an internal ide DVD drive (CD ROM drive works half the time) I have a spare 1 gb stick of ram for it so if I do all these upgrades as long as the motherboard doesn’t fail it should be good to go for a while. Probably long enough that there will be no chance by then to put together another 98 machine lol. If anyone has any input on open source software for a galvo laser I’m still open to it. I haven’t really come across to much doing web searches.
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