How to kill ORCAD 10.5 Capture in three operations

He who uses Capture deserves it ;-)

...Jim Thompson

Probably so! I'm constantly amazed just how BAD things have to be to get companies to switch products, however -- them seem to seroiusly overestimate the cost of changing to a better product vs. the ongoing cost of using a mediocre product!

One of these days you should try out SIMetrix SPICE (either standalone with their own schematic capture front-end or embedded within Pulsonix or EasyPC)... you might like it! :-)

I still use the old original MicroSim Schematics... works great.

...Jim Thompson

Joel, I did the three steps without crashing. Bevor I installed OrCad 10.5, I removed the old Version (10.3) and did a registry cleaning.

OK I don't like OrCad very much, but the others I had a look at didn't convince me either. The easiest to work with was Wintek's HiWire II, but this was in an other century.

Capture 10.5 has some noticeable improvements over 9.2. IMO, the reason a bunch of people (including me) bitch about it is because they've used other tools that are simply more "expert friendly." That is, once you've gotten used to work with the tool on a regular basis, are you able to become more productive by being able to customize the tool to work exactly the way you think? Capture doesn't do so well in this respect. Witness:

Symbol Editing:

Tab+click works to select one of multiple overlapping objects, but this doesn't work in conjunction with multiple select (ctrl-click). For very small objects, trying to click and drag to move the object always seems to try to resize the object instead. Maximum zoom level is artifically low (i.e., you can't take a 0.1" wide line and make it occupy half the screen) One can't set the pick radius for selection!

Pins have to be placed strictly around a bounding box perimeter rather than just letting you place pins wherever you like. Pin styles are limited (e.g., no indepedent selection of pin length)

Can't turn off the display of their names on a pin-by-pin basis The same line style applied to different objects is not actually the same width

General:

No ability to change or add keyboard mappings No macro that performs some desired actions, i.e., one to merely _start_ commands such as "Zoom Area" (using ZoomArea in a macro requires specifying the exact coordinates of the area to zoom). Rotate, mirror, and similar commands don't work while pasting a copied object

When drawing a polyline, there's no way to delete just the last segment "Properties" command doesn't work while drawing some objects (e.g., boxes or circles or lines), nor immediately after placement... yet it does work with others (e.g., while placing pins)!

Line styles are limited (e.g., no independent selection of line width, no lines with built-in arrows) There's no area DE-select option. Toggling from area select of 'everything TOUCHING the selection box' to 'everything strictly INSIDE the box' can't be done from keyboard.

When you click on a wire, there's no display in, e.g., the status line to tell you the net's name. (Must specifically ask for properties) A bus can only contain an array of a single net name, e.g., DATA[0:7] -- very limiting.

These are all features that many other programs have that ORCAD doesn't. Here's a few desirable features that, while less common in general and hence not really what I'd consider "expected" these days, do exist in other packages and would be nice additions to ORCAD:

Tabbed window view

Multiple physical pins on part (e.g., all Gnds on an FPGA) can be represented by one symbol pin Multiple physical parks can be represented by one symbol (e.g., 24 decoupling capacitors) Automatically uses different grids for different objects (e.g., components and wires)

Can select items within an arbitrarily drawn outline

I'm not suggesting that "ORCAD sucks"; it is a powerful tool that doesn't have any truly "severe" limitations. The database integration is also a notably good feature that many other tools lack or don't perform nearly as well. I'm mainly disappointed to see the lack of new development being put into Capture these days, especially when you look at the not-at-all cheap price tag that Cadence gets for the thing.

---Joel

Thanks, that's what I "wanted" to hear -- it must be an incompatibility between ORCAD and something else we all seem to have installed on our systems.

"Jim Thompson" a écrit dans le message de news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

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Agree for simulation. It has nothing to do there. But I use it for PCB schematics entry since many years with almost no pb. At least not more than with other packages.

Apart some limitations, I've always wondered why everybody's bitching about it.

I did a little exploration and found that this particular problem appears to caused by ORCAD's installation overwriting hhctrl.ocx with a rather old version _without bothering to check whether or not the current hhctrl.ocx is newer!_. *** ORCAD 9.2 had this exact same problem, which means that in over THREE YEARS Cadence hasn't fixed it!!!

Also disappointing was that a call to Cadence's help desk resulted in the usual "No, we're not aware of that problem, sir... we'll add it to our list..."

---Joel

Are you surprised? This is the result of "killing the competition by acquisition", a procedure that shouldn't be allowed in this country, but is

OrCAD ate MicroSim (PSpice), then Cadence ate OrCAD. You can bet that OrCAD and PSpice will vanish from the world.

...Jim Thompson

Hello Jim,

Even phone companies can do that. I am all for free enterprise but that one is becoming scary. Two corporate elephant marriages at the same time. I guess our deal with 10c/min international will soon fizzle and this in light of the fact that our EU friends now pay about 2c/min for the same path but orginating from Europe. It used to be the other way around.

Yeah, it may go the way of Studebaker and DeSoto. But as with cars there is plenty of competition, just not all domestic.

Regards, Joerg