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Orcad SDT/386 freezing with a Radeon HD 4300

Hi,

I have been using Orcad since the early 1980s... moved to SDT/386 c.

1993. I now run the U.S. (un-dongled) version, 1.2 I think.

Later I used it successfully under win2000, though it would run only in a DOS box in 640x480 and only full-screen. This is a bit tacky and nowhere near as nice as it was under DOS6.2 using an old ATI Graphics Ultra Pro 8514-emulating video card, but quite usable.

It always worked fine, printing to a 300dpi PCL printer or to postscript files.

Now, I have built a new PC which has a 2-core CPU, WinXP SP3, 3GB RAM, etc plus a different video card.

And SDT/386 still runs as before, but randomly freezes.

Does anybody know a way around this?

Googling reveals various "solutions" ranging from disabling all the CPU cores but one, through various drivers (which I can't find), through various DOS emulators, to using an Nvidia 9500 video card which supposedly supports VESA all the way to 1024x768 etc.

Can anyone suggest a way forward?

I still have a PCI bus version of that ATI GUP video card but it is no good for running windoze, with any modern monitor on it.

I did try a windoze version of Orcad about 10 years ago and it was absolute crap. It did not even properly open the SDT/386 files, without moving text labels etc around the place.

Many thanks in advance.

Peter

Reply to
Peter
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You need to go to to

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for this sort of info.

Some have reported multicore computers causing problems with SDT. I believe they turned off the cores in the BIOS. I use SDT on a dual processor machine, and have seen it run on an 8 core machine under XP with no problem.

There are new video drivers for SDT which allow you to use SDT in a window. This works well in XP and Win2k. No need for DOS virtual machines and you can have all your favorite windows open while you work in SDT. Look for the TBGDI099 drivers in the files section of the above mentioned group. I've had good luck using modern Nvidia based video boards for SDT and the modern driver. Modern ATI video boards are slow for some reason.

If you look through the files section, there's also methods to get nice PDF outputs of your schematic from the postscript output SDT provides. Pretty output and searchable text. Look for sch2pdf.

Reply to
qrk

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Try the yahoo user group.

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Apparently the files section has Vesa drivers that allow resolutions upto 1600x1200.

Regards Anton Erasmus

Reply to
Anton Erasmus

Anton Erasmus wrote

Fantastic advice - thank you.

Actually, they have GDI drivers, for either full-screen or windowed. These are awesome. It basically makes SDT/386 into a windoze program, but without the baggage of a windoze Orcad :)

Took a while to get it working though. If you have a "non compatible" video card then the default VGA driver vga640.drv doesn't load and crashes the process. One has to manually edit the orcaddd environment variable to point to the right GDI driver .drv name, and then run sdt_c to configure Orcad itself to use the same driver.

I now have it working with an Nvidia 8800.

Reply to
Peter

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