#Protel pcb viewer full#
#Protel pcb viewer software#

#Protel pcb viewer software#

They had to backpedal rapidly, and eventually Protel bought them out and brought their more well-reasoned software development strategy to bear. That was Protel 95, so totally unusable it was a VERY bad joke. Accel was getting pressure to add stuff, and rewrote the basic functionality of Protel's product in (I think, C) and pushed it out. For history, Accel was the US distributor of the Protel products.

I know that I asked for a number of these. I no longer remember the areas that got improved/extended, but they seemed to be good and logical places to add features, not stupid fluff. it does have editable shortcuts and menu selections, which I have customized a bit. If the board doesn't work, the schematic is just wrong, and no EDA tool can fix that! If you can get a copy of Protel 99SE with SP6, I think you will find it is an extension/improvement over Protel schematic and PCB, with much the same flavor. I've done 200+ boards with it so far, up to 6 layer. And, the DRC on the PCB seems to be 100%. Most important to me, is that the schematic checks have only one bug (if you have the same pin number twice on a component, it fouls up the net generation and rules checks.) Other than that, the number of goofs it detects in multi-page schematics seems to be 100%. There are about 5, maybe, bugs there, but it is pretty easy to avoid them. Protel 95 and Protel 98 were horrible! Protel 99 showed promise. There was some way to build a duplicate license server for that case, by cloning the MAC of the server's ethernet card, but it is still a hassle. They also run the floating license locking system where if the license server breaks you can't use the program anymore.

#Protel pcb viewer full#

But I know that program would take me a year to learn and probably still is full of bugs. He dropped the price to 10k and later to 5k.

I told him we still use PCB 2.8 so don't need it. I had the Altium salesman on the phone a while ago, pushing a GBP 20k product. The PCB 2.8 I have, GBP 1500 at the time, is a legit copy. It had Orcad SDT schematic import but the result was rubbish, with components moved around etc. They did a PCB v3 but from what I saw it was full of bugs and barely usable. Was there ever a successor which retains the functionality without introducing massive bloat? Protel got taken over by various companies afterwards. It takes netlists from Orcad SDT/386 which also works great under XP, using the GDI drivers. It does all I need and has almost no bugs. This is a great package, 1995 vintage, which I still use, under windows XP (doesn't work under win7-64).