I have a 3m and have been drip feeding it for years. My setup required buying the 8 chips from Memmex in Canada. They are the ones under the black CPA plug on the top of the motherboard. They were expensive but all I have to do to switch from machine memory to drip feeding thru the rs232 port is hit the e-stop and change the I/O parameter to a 1. If you plan on using alot of long programs it might be the way to go. Just for a side note the display doesn't show the program while running in drip feed mode. The program has to be read from the pc screen. Hope this helps some. Dan