Protel DXP

What works

To make Protel DXP work, I needed to install a collection of native Windows odbc DLLs; that is, DLLs named od*.dll (I think they came from a Win98 install). And then in winecfg, configure DXP to use a native odbc32. With that change, DXP opens and seems to completely work. I opened existing projects, schematics and PCB boards, navigated around them, made small edits, and generated Gerber files. I used common things like the inspector and libraries, and it all appeared to work.

What does not

While all the pop up dialogs seem to work, they are all hideously slow on my machine. Since these are constantly used, for example to select components from a library, change component parameters, change line widths, etc, this effectively makes DXP unusable for serious work. For some reason, the dialogs are all missing the border on the sides and bottom. Scrolling and zooming around in the schematics is slightly slow, but reasonable. Within the PCB it is rather more sluggish, though usable. But the slow scrolling would also make any hand editing of the PCB somewhat painful. In the CAMtastic window, the zooming is broken. If you attempt to zoom in just a bit with the mouse wheel, it zooms all the way in, and similarly for zooming out. And the zooming is quite slow, though it makes for an interesting flashing show while it is happening.

Workarounds

What was not tested

I did not attempt to create a project from scratch. There are many features within DXP that were not tested.

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments