PSpice for TI

I think they adapted Tina because it starts with TI.

LT Spice turned out to be a big deal.

Yes, Tina was a big mistake.

But there's quite a learning curve with Capture/PSpice so I don't think we'll see PSpice netlists posted in this group any time soon.

Anyway, Jim Thompson would have approved (maybe not so much with Capture...)

What I remember of Orcad Capture, admittedly in the DOS days, was how terrible it was. Is it any good now?

I found LT Spice pretty easy to learn and use, at least for basic sims of common circuits.

He mocked LT Spice.

Why is Tina a mistake? Is it not a good tool?

Any idea what is the difference between Tina and Capture/PSpice?

LTspice is easy to run, you click the button. Lots of things relating to importing models and performing more complex analysis can be rather arcane.

Am 26.07.20 um 00:40 schrieb snipped-for-privacy@highlandsniptechnology.com:

Dos Orcad capture was great. No circuit editor was more efficient than that. We left Orcad when the Windows version came out. A big step backwards. I remember how we pressed Xilinx to provide Orcad libraries and a netlist converter to Xact. And they gave in. Futurenet had no future.

It's pretty nice. I expected it to be a lot worse. It'll show various things, like a frequency response curve.

I'd like to be able to extract the transfer function from a schematic. Might be a bit much to ask. I've seen... various things, but ( for lack of a better metaphor ), it'd be nice if it'd produce something that could be massaged into a MATLAB tf() .... thing.

Dunno what use it is, but there's LiveSpice.

So you can enter the schematic of an audio widget and it simulates it in real time against your audio hardware. Stuff like guitar pedals for a start.

It all feels like early days for this stuff.

DOS Orcad was surprisingly good.

I remember discussing keyboard vs mouse entry with someone that was using Mental Graphics stuff. He refused to believe that schematics and PCBs could be easily created without a mouse.

After 10 mins watching me use it, he revised his opinion.

I may still have a copy somewhere, but not the dongle.

I thought Orcad was a drawing program that didn't understand circuits. I remember a connection wire ending a couple of pixels away from a pin, a visible connection that didn't actually connect.

PADS was a revelation. You couldn't hang a wire segment in space. Connections weren't just line segments. You couldn't end a connection anywhere but on a pin or a t-joint to another wire. It understood.

LT Spice will let you draw a visible connection that doesn't connect. And you can scatter arbitrary wire segments anywhere in free space.

Am 26.07.20 um 01:50 schrieb snipped-for-privacy@highlandsniptechnology.com:

Never had problems with that. In fact, cursor & mouse moved in fixed steps, which was essential for the quick movements. I even wrote a program that took the optimized sum-of-products equations from PALASM2, created timing models from them and made an Orcad subcircuit that allowed me to simulate the PALs with the rest of my circuit in SILOS. It simply piped the drawing commands from a file into the character input of Orcad. That looked like a ghost drawing circuits at warp speed.

I also had a nice ECL100K library connected with the same mechanism via Orcad to SILOS.

Orcad layout was buggy. We used Orcad schematics with PADS layout and then transitioned to Visula on workstations.

Altium Designer now has NG-spice as simulator since version 19. Since I have it, I should really give it a try. Stand-alone NG-spice looks interesting.

cheers, Gerhard

I'm not a fan of Capture. For a schematic front end to PSpice a lot of people (especially long term pSpice users) still use Microsim Schematics (that's what Jim Thompson did). I still use it and it works fine in

OrCad SDT (the DOS schematic entry program) was probably the most productive schematic entry program I've ever used. It's the Vi/Emacs of the schematic world. Although I started using Protel/Altium in the 90's I still used SDT as a front end until about 10 years ago.

It still has community support - for example VESA drivers supporting resolutions of up to 1600x1200 (last time I checked) were written by the user community.