Scor­pio News

had developed severe personality problems and seemed to be determined to design knitting patterns.

Initial reactions

The manual is helpful and, as the author suggests, there is extensive on-line help on a variety of topics which are called up by pressing “?”. The manual suggests that you call up the program by typing PCB – but in the review copy, the program is executed by typing RUNPCB. There are several other differences in file names and the review copy did not have a READ.ME file with late news, additional information etc. The manual suggests that there is one demonstration PCB on which you can practice, but I found two others. Because of limitations on the resolution offered by the graphics screen, the maximum area that can be seen on-screen at one time is 3″ square. Additional areas are accessed by cursor movement.

The commands list is pretty comprehensive and standard 0.3″ and 0.6″ DIL packages from 8 to 40 pin are catered for. The track width is fixed at about 0.5 mm (but with a bit of ingenuity one can do double or greater widths). Tracks can be routed between DIL or ID plug pads and, when passing through a pad, leave the drill hole clear. I was pleased to see that there is a facility for indicating pin 1 on DIL packages but less pleased to see that pad outlines for ID plugs, transistors and TO72 can (or whatever the outline is) i.c.s weren’t available. I would have liked to have been able to add my own pad layouts to a library, but wasn’t able to. I understand that enhancements to the program are under way and I would be interested to see what the author has been up to!

The commands for the circuit board editor take a bit of getting used to but this should pose no problem for those who have cut their teeth on PEN, or similar multi-command packages. A couple of hours soon had me placing pads, tracks and DIL packages where I wanted to and, the ease with which this could be done using the cursor control keys and “ring-sight” cursor was very pleasing.

I printed out one of the example PCBs and my own efforts and was quite pleased with the results.

Further thoughts

The printer dumps were adequate but not, as they were, suitable for use as PCB masters. To judge from the speed with which they were produced, I suspect that they are single density jobs, compared with the quad. density used, for example by Pineapple. This point is made in the manual and quite a lot of work had to be done using a fine pen and Indian ink to tidy up the fuzzy pad outlines and to ensure