Hi Iggy.
I inherited a year or two ago, a nice Shizuoka ST-N CNC mill. This is a
3-axis machine with a nice large CNC rotary table giving it a 4th axis. It
was given to me by a good friend who couldn't fit it into his workshop. It
has low hours and was only ever used for machining acrylic.

This Japanese machine was originally sourced from and fitted out by a UK
company, Matchmaker, who fitted an unknown control system with arm mounted
CRT and button panel. The only thing we can easily recognise in the bird's
nest that is inside the control cabinet is the 4qty, Westamp PWM servo amp
model no. 30060-3. I take it that this means we have servos rather than
steppers? This makes sense as they (large) motors have 4 brushes. I think
they have 2-wire tachos built in too. I'm not sure what encoders we have yet
as they haven't been stripped out for identification.

The control system is dead. The CRT is dead, and I don't trust the Westamp
boards. However we'd probably keep the big DC PSU, buy 4 new servo drives
and fit a variable freq drive for the spindle.
This brings me to the big question. What controller should we choose? We'd
like to do as you have done, and use EMC2 on a (Linux?) PC, but don't have
any idea of what controller we need for the 'bit in between'.

I'd appreciate your advice on this if can spare a moment.

Many thanks in advance.

JB