Useful CAD set-up for PC/Atari

[Chris Crosskey]

Hi People,
The recent talk of CAD systems and someone on the lookout for a Falcon 
seems to tie in nicely with  the following.....

At home I use an Atari STe as my main computer, basically i've owned 
one for ages, originally to run Cubase, but over the years it has been 
added to until now it does my CAD, PCB design, email, DTP etc etc, all 
the usual functions of a home computer. Mostly, apart from the MIDI 
stuff of course it does the technical things I need, PCB's, CAD and 
EPROM programming. 

At work I use a P166 Pentium as part of my everyday work. Now part of 
my duties is minor electronic and mechanical design. Having tried a 
number of CAD packages and a couple of PCB design tools I ended up 
asking my boss if he would consider buying an Atari emulator for the 
PC and letting me run the Atari software I know and use at home on 
the PC instead. He agreed on the basis that he's seen examples of my 
home produced stuff, and the firm duely bought Gemulator for me. 
Installation went without a hitch and now I'm runiing Scooter PCB and 
MultiCAD within Gemulator under Windows 95. The performance is 
staggering, according to GEMbench the system is emulating an ST 
approximately 10 times or more faster than my ST, the PCB and  CAD 
packages fly, at resolutions my ST will never see. Before you start 
muttering that ST programs can hardly be puitting out industry 
standard output let me tell you that Scooter does NC and Gerber (and a 
whole host more) outputs and explains them very well in the manual and 
MultiCAD does both CADja and .DXF. Both are easy to fly (the GEM 
system is quite similar to the old Mac one) and best of all the 
emulator plus the two programs will cost you about 130 UKP total. You 
could pay more than that for for a usable PCB package. I know there's 
a PROTEL package that's free, but it is limited and some people, 
myself included find it hard going, Scooter will do a double layer 
circuit board with about 16 layers of artwork and things (screens on 
both sides, completely reconfigurable outlines, even halfway through 
the design etc) but it is fast, easy to use and after a few minutes 
everything seems to be coming very much second nature, and the same is 
true of MultiCAD. On an ST they're great, on a fast PC with Gemulator 
they are wonderful.......

my $0.02

chrisc