In the beginning there was Protel, before they became Altium. A small Australian company that developed good schematic/pcb cad software at a great price. I bought my copy of Protel Advanced PCB 2.8/Advanced Scematic 3 in the late 90's. It was excellent software and still is. I definitely preferred it to the Protel 98/99.
Not able to afford the $10k price tag of Altium Designer 15 I've been looking at reusing the old software for hobby purposes. It runs fine under WinXPx32, but my 2 computers run Win10x64 and Win7x32. Virtual machines work very well, but they are a bit cumbersome to use: You have to boot them and then get your info in and out of them, they also have to be configured.
So I tried to run the Protel under Win7x32 and found the schematic program was fine but the pcb software would have its buttons corrupted if you opened it, closed it then opened it again. The problem lies with the 16 bit DLL, BWCC.DLL. Doesn't matter what version you use the problem is the same. It doesn't happen under WinXPx32, but there are problems if you use the Microsoft XP extension to Win7x32.
It looks like there is a problem with the 16 to 32 bit code in Win7x32, WOWEXEC.EXE. The solution to the corrupted buttons is:
1. Just "Log off" and back in or
2. Open Task Manager and close the process "wowexec.exe"
Then you can open Advanced PCB 2.8 and the buttons will be correct or
3. Always keep it open, also keeping the schematic software open seems to work as it uses the same BWCC.DLL.
I did manage to try Altium Designer 14 and found that the schematic capture was just like the old Protel 3.0, same short cuts etc. it felt very familiar. The one thing I miss though is not having the modern libraries to use. Does some one know of a way to back port them ?
