BSPICE Circuit Simulator Port for Risc OS

A long long time ago in a country far far away, Frank and Eric van de Pol ported BSPICE-3a4 to Risc OS, and wrote Nutmeg v1.7 (the graphical post-processor). This was all well and good in the halcyon days before StrongARMs came along, but this version doesn't work with StrongARM's unless you have !StrongGuard (from the ARM Club). Nobody ever found out Frank and Eric began an update for SA compatibility, using BSPICE version 3F4+ sources: they never finished it, and pissed off to Linux before it was complete.

I've had to get acquainted with SPICE for my electronics course, so it seemed sensible to email them and find out what happened: after many a dead end, Frank explained the situation: he'd collected all the development version parts onto a CD and given it to a fella by the name of Koos Fockens, who kept it safe and warm for years. Now I've got 2 CD copies of their source, as well as the Berkeley originals.

I'll put all the existing bits on this page for people to download and play with, in an attempt to track down bugs, and attract some attention from those who can program in the WIMP; sadly I am not a member of this dwindling band. There's also information on the current state of play.


Just what is SPICE?

It simulates analogue circuits: the name is derived from Simulating Program with Integrated Circuit Emphasis. It's the industry standard tool for the job, although there are many different versions/flavours, most of them commercial. BSpice accepts a textfile describing the circuit and the required analyses, make suitable approximations, then does lots of number-crunching, outputing a 'rawfile' in ASCII format (a big list of numbers). Then the rawfile can be loaded into Nutmeg so you can graph the data. Unfortunately, due to the way BSpice must calculate convergence, it's absolutely useless if you don't know what the output should look like! Thus it isn't a tool for initial circuit design, or just cobbling together a simple amplifier. If you think it'll help with your A level electronics, you are very sadly mistaken; if you know it can help with your A-level electronics, you should be at university.

That said, if you know your rectifier from your rectum please download and have a play ;-)


Downloads

Original version

Original ports of BSPICE 3a4, with Nutmeg 1.70. This only works on SAs if you have !StrongGuard, and to my knowledge has very few bugs other than those inherent in the version.

[ ]Older package (433k zip, Mon 20 Dec 1999)

Newest version

BSpice now consists of 3 different versions (2G6, 3F4 lite and 3F4) which can be selected from the frontend. The newer Nutmeg 2.00 works better, but isn't finished - you can't change the preferences for graph style etc.

[ ]Newer package (1.46M zip, Mon 20 Dec 1999)

Docs

Some textfiles that Frank & Eric did, and some I found on the net for Spice 3f3: the latter were in postscript format, so I converted them to text.

[ ]Documents (251k zip, Mon 20 Dec 1999)

Demo circuits

Extra circuit descriptions, 'as I got them' so file extensions may need removing.

[ ]Circuits (150k zip, Sat 27 Nov 1999)

My port

This works well, only lacking the polish of the original RiscOS port. The batch spice output is fully compatible with Nutmeg 2.00, and can be loaded by Nutmeg 1.70 with some jiggery-pokery.
Included is batch spice 3f4 (with a front-end), multidec (for creating transmission line subcircuits, also with front-end), sconvert (translates from binary to ascii rawfile formats and back) and proc2mod (process file, whatever that is, to spice model converter).

[ ]My bspice (400k zip, Sat 15 Jan 2000)

Raw2CSV converter

This is a simple program to convert a Spice 3 rawfile to CSV, so you can use a spreadsheet package to graph the data. It's just a command-line thing, no frills, but it splits up the real/imaginary parts of complex numbers (spreadsheets are usually real number only!) and copes with multiple plots.

[ ]Raw2CSV (4k zip, Sat 02 Jan 2000)



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Guy Griffin