After 36 years as a paid product, the Micro-Cap Circuit Simulator is now free

by lightlyused on 1/9/2020, 10:11 PM with 82 comments
  • by garganzol on 1/10/2020, 8:44 AM

    The website says that the company was closed.

    Does anyone have an insight on why Spectrum Software is now closed?

    P.S. The man behind the company, Andy Thompson, seems to be an excessively humble person. He left a lot of details in the mist. However, all these details are priceless to us mere humans. Memoirs? A blog? 39 years in business is not a small feat.

  • by nrclark on 1/10/2020, 4:55 AM

    This is very exciting! Especially the SPICE model library. Microcap's libraries have lots of SPICE models that I haven't seen anywhere else. Being able to grab them will be awesome, even if I wind up using them with LTSPICE.

  • by lsiebert on 1/10/2020, 1:42 PM

    I really hope someone mirrors this on github or something, because there is no guarantee that a website for a closed company will be around for any length of time.

    I lost some important records because yahoo shut down it's group archive last year (and banned the archive team from saving stuff wtf), and it's been on my mind lately.

  • by macintux on 1/10/2020, 2:24 AM

    40 years isn’t bad for a small software shop. I hope Mr. Thompson is satisfied with how things turned out.

    Anyone here use the software?

  • by gowld on 1/10/2020, 2:45 AM

    How does this compare to modern circuit simulators?

    https://www.tinkercad.com/ (Web)

    http://www.virtualbreadboard.com/ (Windows)

  • by emmanueloga_ on 1/10/2020, 2:50 AM

    There's so pretty much seemingly unique proprietary software. A while ago I found this awesome logic minimizer called "logic Friday". [1] I don't think there's a free or open source version of a tool like this.

    I have an idea that the "espresso" algorithm could be used to minimize not only electronic circuits but general boolean expressions for any programming language... I think it would do for a useful refactoring tool.

    1: https://web.archive.org/web/20131022051516/http://www.sontra...

  • by peter_retief on 1/10/2020, 7:06 AM

    I have never heard of this, is it appropriate to ask if anyone could describe it in one sentence?

  • by forgotpwd16 on 1/10/2020, 3:31 PM

    Free as in beer. It will have been ever better if it had been released as free software.

  • by scrumper on 1/10/2020, 3:03 PM

    Is this good for analog stuff, at least as effective as LTSpice?

    I've been using the latter on a Mac for simulating vacuum tube (UK: valve) circuits with some success and a very large amount of frustration. I would love something a little less actively user-hostile...

  • by ngcc_hk on 1/10/2020, 4:30 AM

    Open source possible?

  • by modo_mario on 1/10/2020, 11:26 AM

    Any chance of it becoming FOSS?

  • by extra__tofu on 1/10/2020, 3:32 PM

    Wow, used this extensively in my undergrad. Always used the free version. I remember occasionally running into the "too many nodes" error. Thanks to the creator for releasing the full version for free. I'm sure many EE undergrads will be grateful.

  • by znpy on 1/10/2020, 10:31 AM

    It seems to be working with Wine under GNU/Linux.

    I'll try it better when I get home.

  • by anonymou2 on 1/10/2020, 9:01 AM

    free as in free beer

  • by dang on 1/10/2020, 1:58 AM

    I pinched the title from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20495077 since it's more informative. If this is inaccurate, please let us know. (Submitted title was "Micro-Cap User Downloads – Now Free".)

  • by monoideism on 1/10/2020, 2:52 AM

    I'd love to try it out, but I'm not downloading an executable from an `http` URL.

    Edit: I hope the downvotes are because it supports `https` (just not by default, thanks to progman32 for correcting me) and not because you think that not wanting to download an executable over an open connection is an unreasonable thing.