If you look on youtube you will find someone from the mach forum's lathe which uses a smoothstepper. Hood I think his name is. He seems most impressed with it, I mailed him on youtube and asked about it, I gather he couldn't get decent rapids without one.
I wanted to try a cnc brain but the bloke over here who has one running tells me the only person with a properly working setup with one is Bruce and he doesn't infact use USB but something home made and much more robust. But I gather work is ongoing and the motion control is being completly rewritten from scratch.

I will probably be trying a SmoothStepper on my Matsuura. can you run
with 12000 counts per rev and a parrallel port?