Just a follow-up to my own post - one bad thing, one good thing:
1) The bad: I've done a bit more playing around with the current version of CircuitMaker a bit more and it is definitely not for me - it has a serious flaw: If you just want to sketch a schematic, you can't drop in a symbol & give it some values; you are forced to select a real-world component, which requires browsing in a very slow catalog, etc. This is a limitation the old CircuitMaker 2000 didn't have nor do other simulators.
Another big flaw: it is cloud-based, including all your data files! This may or may not explain why it's so slow. Apparently you can't even use if if you are offline Or so this review of the beta release from this past summer says.
2) The good: I found a download of the old CircuitMaker 2000; this is apparently the version people actually liked. The link I used came from here; I don't know how long it will be good for. It's a RAR file but so far no viruses - I am running a virtual Windows so not too worried about that anyway. And unlike the new CircuitMaker, CircuitMaker 2000 seems quite easy to use.
1) The bad: I've done a bit more playing around with the current version of CircuitMaker a bit more and it is definitely not for me - it has a serious flaw: If you just want to sketch a schematic, you can't drop in a symbol & give it some values; you are forced to select a real-world component, which requires browsing in a very slow catalog, etc. This is a limitation the old CircuitMaker 2000 didn't have nor do other simulators.
Another big flaw: it is cloud-based, including all your data files! This may or may not explain why it's so slow. Apparently you can't even use if if you are offline Or so this review of the beta release from this past summer says.
2) The good: I found a download of the old CircuitMaker 2000; this is apparently the version people actually liked. The link I used came from here; I don't know how long it will be good for. It's a RAR file but so far no viruses - I am running a virtual Windows so not too worried about that anyway. And unlike the new CircuitMaker, CircuitMaker 2000 seems quite easy to use.