Bringing Outdated TAZ4 Marlin into the Present Build

I have a completely unmodified Lulzbot TAZ4 that runs Marlin 2014Q3 firmware with the original Budaschnozzle 2.0 hot end. It’s ancient but still prints beautifully. I’m doing a firmware upgrade so I can replace the hot end and extruder with something a bit more up-to-date and I don’t have access to the original firmware source that I can trust.

I can upgrade and flash the firmware to Marlin 1.1.9.1 without any problem. My motherboard is a RAMBo 1.3L which uses an ATmega2560 (AVR 8-bit).

Rather than Marlin 1.1.9.1, I would prefer to upgrade to the latest Marlin 2.1.2.7 but I have been told by an authority that knows vastly more about firmware than I do that I cannot (or should not) do that because Marlin 2.x.x.x firmware does not run satisfactorily on an 8 bit motherboard.

According to the Marlin Github, Marlin 2.1 explicitly supports both 32-bit ARM and 8-bit AVR boards, including the RAMBo 1.3L, and the official Marlin documentation confirms that RAMPS and similar AVR-based boards work with current Marlin releases.

So I’m confused. Can I upgrade my setup to the latest Marlin 2.x.x.x or not, and is it even worth doing on my old machine ? Buying a newer machine is not an acceptable option.

Marlin makes every effort to continue to support 8 bit controllers like the RAMBo on Marlin 2.x

What will not work is new features like ft motion. These require a 32 bit controller

Marlin even provides example configs for the TAZ4 eg [github.com] for Marlin bugfix 2.1.x [github.com]

And other releases

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/02/2026 05:04AM by Dust.

Thanks very much, especially for the link to the TAZ4 example configs, which I was not aware of.

Having now read through those, I don't see anything that I'd classify as a "haven't got, must have" feature for this machine and with the hardware upgrades I have in mind so prudence tells me to stick with my stable 1.1.9.1 release.

I can't see any benefit in upgrading to the latest Marlin just because it's there.