Looking for CADSTAR 7, CADSTAR 6 and UPLOAD programs

[Jake-san]

I'm trying to save a huge trouble of redrawing old boards from films, but customer only has old *.CDO and *.CDI files available digitally. Their original supplier has went already belly up few years ago.

Does anyone have these old DOS softwares to share? Main priority is the UPLOAD software, since CADSTAR Express should open the old DOS 7.0 files, but the program just crashes, hinting the format might be the old Cadstar 6 ones.

Help!

[Warhawk]

Would not import to Altium or Kicad work? Both theoretically have Cadstar importer.

[nctnico]

Would not import to Altium or Kicad work? Both theoretically have Cadstar importer.

Importing PCBs into other packages rarely works well. The problem is that often the way the pads, traces and copper pours are defined are simply not compatible between the programs. So you end up with a lot of work cleaning up a design and you may look over something important (like having enough clearance). And then there are things like constraints for length, impedance and phase matching.

[SiliconWizard]

Would not import to Altium or Kicad work? Both theoretically have Cadstar importer.

Dunno about Altium, but KiCad can only import Cadstar files in ASCII format (which I think is .cda) and not in binary format (*.cdi), so, not gonna work here.
And unfortunately you need Cadstar to export to .cda.

[Jake-san]

Would not import to Altium or Kicad work? Both theoretically have Cadstar importer.

I'll try looking into this, but as far as I can tell, the kiCad import wants the project file to import, not the individual layer files the .cdi/.cdo files are.

Will also try Altium today also.

[peter-h]

This is why I still use Protel PCB 2.8, 1995 vintage

Runs perfectly in a winXP VM on a win7-64 machine. I bought it legit, £1500, in 1995, and to future-proof it I got a crack to remove the dongle.