From: Andy Kunz To: PICLIST@MITVMA.MIT.EDU Date: Saturday, 19 July 1997 23:08 Subject: Re: PCB & Schematic >At 09:35 PM 7/18/97 -0700, you wrote: >>I'm interested in buying PCB and Schematic Capture software for work. The >>two I've heard about but not sure if they are any good is Protel and Orcad >>(Win95). Anyone have any experience (good or bad) with either or something >>else? I'd appreciate any comments to help me decide. I have about $6K to >>spend. > >My one customer refers to Protel as "Pro-Hell" if that's any indication. If they are talking about the Windows version, I second that!! Its slow, expensive, and very non-intuitive. The DOS based autotrax is, well, satisfactory at best. As someone else said, they stopped supporting it years ago, and this shows up mostly in the video driver area - it seems to stop in the standard (not SVGA) area of EGA. Sure, there are some specially written drivers for old boards, but nothing remotely up to date, like PCI cards. If they'd gone the extra step and produced a VESA driver... There's one called TraxMaker, approx 5-600 dollars, runs on Win32 platforms. Can't say anything about printing, as I've only seen demo Check site MikeS