Orcad 9.2 copper pour

I'm always amazed at the problems that "modern" cad packages have, compared to good old dos orcad.

I bought 9.2 a while back, when it was new.. I found it totally unusable. Everything I wanted to do came with a 20 step undocumented magic dance that you had to do in order to get it to work. I spent most of my days on the phone with orcad, uninstalling, reinstalling, and discovering these undocumented problems, that might get fixed in the next release, which coincidentally happens just after the support runs out on this release... :-P

It's sitting on the shelf now, and I use the last released version of DOS orcad. Banging schematics and boards out in hours, not weeks.

Hi, I need some help to draw a copper pour area with Orcad 9.2. Using fast fill copper pour , the area is filled very fast but I can't extract Gerber Files correctly. Using normal fill, it takes a lot of time for fill the area, also each time I want to zoom in/out the draw. How can I speed up this filling? Anyone know some settings or things to do?

Thanks a lot advance

Ronnie

That about sums it up. Hopefully another memory stick will fix this guy up, but I doubt he'll have any luck with win9x or ME.

Any two of one of my CADs, Dreamweaver, Acrobat 6 Pro, or big stuff like that is all it takes to suck my 256 MB down to nothing.

can't

each time

to do?

This is a known problem in Layout. From Layout help:

Use Fast Fill Mode Reduces the drawing time for copper pour by using a simple pattern to represent copper pour on your screen. This option only affects the display of the copper pour on the screen; it does not accelerate the actual pour process. You must disable this option before you create a Gerber plot.

When doing layout work, use fast fills. When post processing to produce Gerber plots, turn off fast fill. Generally, it is best to keep "Use Pours for Connectivity" enabled.

If you ever switch to version 10.x, you will experience the extremely slow redraw rate for fast fill mode. The non-fast fill mode is much faster. It's almost unusable. Thank goodness skeleton mode redraws quickly. Unfortunately, Layout has a new gaggle of junior programmers who have no idea what a PCB layout program is. It has taken a year to get version 10 functional (fix all the things that were working in version 9).

Too bad Orcad was bought out by Cadence. EMA-EDA (Cadence/Orcad VAR) has been suggesting I move to Allegro. Are they trying to tell me something?

compared

unusable.

dance that

the

which

release...

DOS

Macro Express solves the 20-step process stupidity. Modern programmers don't understand macros let alone command line batch files.

Not only did Cadence buy OrCAD many years ago, now, all of OrCAD development is outsourced to India. Transition occured when they went to 10.0 from 9.2.3. It's been yucky ever since.

About Allegro, I would highly recommend the switch. It's way more productive than Layout will ever be.

It would be nice for SOMEONE to develop an updated and modern layout tool. Even Allegro is a 1990ish legacy tool with long drawn out incremental upgrades. The best I've seen is Mentor's Expedition series ... but $$$.

I tryed with a PENTIUM 4 3GHz 512Mb of RAM.....I think that when Orcad 9.2 was born this PC was only a dream, but nothing change, I think that the problem is a setting. No-one can work and wait hours to fill a copper pour! Mah? Other suggestions? Thanks a lot.

Ronnie "Ronnie" ha scritto nel messaggio news: snipped-for-privacy@individual.net...

time

do?

Solution: Lower the line resolution in the obstacle that will be the copper pour speeds up the desingn time. Ronnie

"Ronnie" ha scritto nel messaggio news: snipped-for-privacy@individual.net...