On 08/09/2014 06:46, Mike Harrison wrote:
> On Mon, 8 Sep 2014 12:43:46 +0530, you wrote:
>
>>> t may not be doable/practical, but I just thought I'd throw this out
>>> there.  Before Altium went to 'Altium', there was PCAD. Quite a few peo=
ple
>>> didn't switch, and still use PCAD.  Altium seems to pretend it never
>>> existed.  I don't know how or if you could get a legal license, but it =
is
>>> perfectly usable.  We've done boards over 20 layers with it, 28 in
>>> diameter,  blind /buried, ...
>>>
>> Is/was that the same as Protel.
>> Clunky, steam driven, works.
>>
> No - P-CAD started life as Accel, and Altium (then Protel) bought it but =
kept the 2 packages running
> for a while before abandoning PCAD. It was designed from scratch to use W=
indows conventions, so has
> no baggage inherited from old DOS packages,


P-CAD indeed inherits some of its user interface from old Tango Pro for
DOS. It even has a Tango Pro compatibility mode, where the keyboard
shortcuts try to mimic or approximate Tango Pro's behavior. It can
convert Tango's libraries and even comes with a lot o Tango's libraries
already converted.

P-CAD has some quirks, but it is perfectly usable for large/complex
boards even today, eight years after its last update.
In Windows 7 some list selectors inside dialogs (most notably the layer
list in the layer management dialog) don't show their contents and make
it hard to use (although not impossible). In Windows XP it works perfectly.

Isaac




>  and is very easy to pick up & use, and most functions
> work in a sensible & obvious way.=20
> You can't buy it, except possibly "used" but it's not hard to find, but h=
as minimal protection - all
> you need is the install package and a serial number :-)
> =20
>



--=20
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