Mach3 loses Motor Tuning menu

Has your Mach3 ‘Motor Tuning’ menu disappeared? Then read on…

You will need to re-register an OCX file if your Mach3 folder is renamed.

1. Open a CMD window running as administrator
2. Enter command regsvr32 c:\mach3\ntgraph.ocx Note: this assumes that mach3 is in the C:\mach3 folder.

An aside

An OCX file contains code which has a predefined function. Mach3 uses OCX to draw its acceleration and speed graphs. The OCX is found in Mach3′ ntgraph.ocx file. The ntgraph.ocx is readily available and free to use saving the developer the need to ‘reinvent the wheel’. OCX technology is archaic and today largely replaced with .DLL files (dynamic linked libraries). Visual Basic, was the first to use the technology which at the time was called VBX. Microsoft later dropped VBX in favour of OCX to support all of its languages. OCX is an acronym of OLE Control EXtension. What then is OLE?

OLE is an acronym of Object Linking and Embedding. Microsoft used OLE to embed controls and files in applications such as spreadsheets and Word documents. Microsoft made a big deal of OLE for embedding Spreadsheets into Word documents.
So why is it in Mach3? Well Mach3 is written in an old version of Visual Basic. The Mach3 developer therefore used the ntgraph.ocx file to incorporated graphs. So why then does the Motor Tuning facility fail?
When Mach3 is installed, the ntgraph.ocx file is registered so that it can be located at runtime. Renaming an installation folder will result in Mach3 failing to find the OCX file. Re-registering the ntgraph.ocx file will resolve the issue.