Hi David ,
I am not sure about that , there are controllers that will , Mach 3 seems to be reliable epically now that the serial port os no longer needed ,
I suppose its limitations is that the processing is done on your PC and sent to the card so a slow Pc could be a problem , where as on the CDE the steps are generated by the card ,
Having said that , I have seen mach 3 running on a Pentium through a serial port to a router , so far the only thing it doesn't do well is a particular type of helical spiral cut but this could be the stepper driver cant keep up , its an old machine he rescued from a skip.

Do you have any idea how to set the steps on the CDE Step1 cards , I have the setting for 400 and 800 steps per rev, but the motors I have are 200 ,
I can use either as Mach3 will send what I tell it to , so if I set to 400 I send roughly half the 800 I want to try them at 200 to see how accuracy is affected
Diarmuid