I don't see any particular "selling points" that can make using SPICE 3f5 on an old Amiga preferable to an improved SPICE version and/or a more powerful newer computer (not necessarily a very advanced SPICE or a contemporary computer).
All the article demonstrates is the practicality of analog design on the Amiga back in the day, which is only relevant now in unlikely and catastrophic forced retrocomputing scenarios; other Amiga software, such as exquisite graphics editors, has retained much more of its usefulness.
Electronic design is intrinsically more useful than fun, and sharper tools make it more enjoyable.
You might be thrilled to sit in front of an Amiga rather than in front of a sad laptop, but are you thrilled by waiting a few minutes more for a simulation run?
Highly recommend Xyce (maintained by Sandia National Labs). It's one of the only Spice variants that is probably good enough to handle Semiconductor circuit modeling.
What a coincidence. I just stumbled over a network analysis program ("network" as in linear AC electronics network; the program is similar to SPICE, but much less capable) on the C64, of all things!
I tried it out for shits and giggles, and it works. And it's even absolutely useable fast, though I've only tried analyzing a small common base amplifier circuit. Not bad at all for something that you can type in as a BASIC program from a magazine in probably less than an hour.
I'm contemplating actually using it for analysis in one of my next projects on my real C64, again just for shits and giggles.
64'er magazine is what forced me to learn German as a teenager (which is not super hard if you're a native Flemish-Dutch speaker.) The quality and technical complexity of their project-of-the-month was always stunning, and explained with amazing detail.
One of their projects was a video genlock PCB that replaced the 1MHz crystal clock with one that was generated by a PLL (and slightly lower than 1MHz) so that the PAL output of the C64 was synchronized with an incoming video signal that was converted to RGB, selectively mixed with the C64 output, and then sent out as PAL again.
It's how I learned about the existence of PLLs. :-)
Another one of their projects replaced the 6502 firmware of the 1541 floppy drive with a database engine so that database queries were executed on the drive instead of on the C64 CPU.
I don't see any particular "selling points" that can make using SPICE 3f5 on an old Amiga preferable to an improved SPICE version and/or a more powerful newer computer (not necessarily a very advanced SPICE or a contemporary computer).
All the article demonstrates is the practicality of analog design on the Amiga back in the day, which is only relevant now in unlikely and catastrophic forced retrocomputing scenarios; other Amiga software, such as exquisite graphics editors, has retained much more of its usefulness.
the selling point is that it's fun and interesting and enjoyable. why does something have to be "useful" to be worthwhile?
Electronic design is intrinsically more useful than fun, and sharper tools make it more enjoyable. You might be thrilled to sit in front of an Amiga rather than in front of a sad laptop, but are you thrilled by waiting a few minutes more for a simulation run?
Highly recommend Xyce (maintained by Sandia National Labs). It's one of the only Spice variants that is probably good enough to handle Semiconductor circuit modeling.
What a coincidence. I just stumbled over a network analysis program ("network" as in linear AC electronics network; the program is similar to SPICE, but much less capable) on the C64, of all things!
The article and the program are in German, from 1985: https://www.64er-magazin.de/8508/netzwerk.html
I tried it out for shits and giggles, and it works. And it's even absolutely useable fast, though I've only tried analyzing a small common base amplifier circuit. Not bad at all for something that you can type in as a BASIC program from a magazine in probably less than an hour.
I'm contemplating actually using it for analysis in one of my next projects on my real C64, again just for shits and giggles.
64'er magazine is what forced me to learn German as a teenager (which is not super hard if you're a native Flemish-Dutch speaker.) The quality and technical complexity of their project-of-the-month was always stunning, and explained with amazing detail.
One of their projects was a video genlock PCB that replaced the 1MHz crystal clock with one that was generated by a PLL (and slightly lower than 1MHz) so that the PAL output of the C64 was synchronized with an incoming video signal that was converted to RGB, selectively mixed with the C64 output, and then sent out as PAL again.
It's how I learned about the existence of PLLs. :-)
Another one of their projects replaced the 6502 firmware of the 1541 floppy drive with a database engine so that database queries were executed on the drive instead of on the C64 CPU.
Amazing stuff.
Edit: the block diagram of the genlock interface: https://www.pouet.net/topic.php?which=12851.
I compiled Spice 2g6 and left it on my home website for years.
It was customized output of f2c, and I had Linux and Cygwin 32-bit binaries.
It's probably still floating around somewhere.
...I actually did this for professors who had published books with Spice 2g6 code that did not work in higher versions.
They really liked me. Everybody ran it from ~me.
I wish I could say that the world has become less reliant on me. It has not.
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